Play: In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

Some plays are so beautiful to read that it's hard to imagine performances that would have the same impact as the bare words on the page.

I've found out that the first British performance (2001) of French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes (1948-1989)'s In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (1986) was at Aldwych tube station, London. I can just imagine it played against the dirt and desolation of the city's underbelly, at night, "amid the squealing of beasts".

Dealer and Client meet and the Dealer offers something the Client tries to refuse. What the content of this transaction might be is and should remain unspoken. I've seen accounts of performances where the costumes suggest heavily it's about drugs or sex: these are all strong possibilities, but there's so much more in the text, about the nature of human relations, of the desperate negotiation within each encounter, that making it too explicit would reduce its existential impact.

In this time of minimalism and surfaces, I admire contemporary artists of any kind who're unafraid to address core questions about human nature and existence, stark and brutal as that might be, especially when they do it as poetically as in this play.

The two men speak in long monologues that become shorter and shorter as the play progresses, while the apparently reluctant (on the Client's part) negotiation takes shape and becomes inescapable. At the end we still don't know what the deal is about and whether anything will be sold or bought, whether any desire will be finally voiced and fulfilled: but the men have accepted to engage.

The language is magnificent, even in translation, as in this:

Dealer: I'm approaching you just the way the dusk approaches that first light, slowly, respectfully, almost affectionately, leaving beast and man far below the street, straining at the leash and baring their teeth so savagely.

and this:

Client: I've set foot in the farmyard and the squelch of mysteries is like shit in the gutter; and from these mysteries and this darkness of yours, comes the rule that states that whenever two men meet each other one must always choose to strike first.

and this:

Dealer: ...the true, terrible cruelty is the one by which some man or beast cuts the other off, like dot...dot... dot in the middle of a sentence, or having first met his eye, then turns away, as though that had been a mistake, like having just started a letter and then screwing it up after writing no more than the date.

or this, simple, Beckettian:

Client: Come on, come with me; let's look for some people, we're exhausted by solitude.