Les Anges Au Plafond: R.A.G.E.

R.A.G.E. by Les Anges au Plafond: An Enigmatic Author’s Life Told Through Complex Puppetry

An Essay by Claudia Orenstein

R.A.G.E., from the French company Les Anges au Plafond, uses a wide range of inventive puppetry and other captivating techniques to convey its elaborate plot. Nonetheless, it is helpful to be familiar with the history and infamous deceptions of the French author Romain Gary, on whose life the production is based, to fully appreciate how the show uses its various means to present this enigmatic figure. An understanding of the central position literature has had historically within French culture, such that Gary would be a topic of national consideration, as well as a view into French anti-Semitism, especially during World War II, are also helpful. I guess that’s a lot of background to ask of your average puppetry festival attendee, with material that is certainly more common knowledge for the company’s French audiences. I was fortunate to learn some of this while hearing R.A.G.E. director Camille Trouvé discuss the show at the festival symposium on “Boundless Bodies” and finding a helpful BBC article about Gary after seeing the show: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180619-romain-gary-the-greatest-literary-bad-boy-of-all. Also useful to my insights into the production is surely my own background as the daughter of a French Jew, who survived the war as a child by living with a Christian family and pretending to be someone other than who he was to escape being deported to a concentration camp.

Gary is infamously the only person to have twice been awarded France’s prestigious Goncourt literary prize. The prize stipulates that an author may receive it only once, but Gary’s second award was given to Émile Ajar, a pseudonym Gary adopted when his own work began receiving lightly veiled anti-Semitic reviews from French critics suggesting that it was somehow not truly “French.” (“Romain Gary” is itself a pseudonym, as he was born “Roman Kacew.”) Gary went so far as to enlist his nephew to portray the fictional Ajar in interviews, only revealing the ruse in a letter left behind after his death by suicide. His autobiography was also posthumously published and full of untruths, like the story that while he fought for France, his mother passed away, leaving 250 letters to be sent to him at intervals so he wouldn’t know she had died and would continue to distinguish himself in battle. His real life might be considered nearly as startling as some of his personal fictions given that, as a Jewish immigrant to France from Lithuania and son of a single mother, he became a decorated World War II pilot, a film director, a diplomat, and a twice-over nationally celebrated novelist. R.A.G.E. (initials drawn from mixing his two literary names, Romain Ajar Gary Emile) attempts to portray the full scope of this life and the complications and contradictions in getting to the heart of this notorious celebrity. Puppets, masks, and multimedia alongside human actors help create a peripatetic stage world of distorted characters and shifting identities. 

Audiences at the Edlis Neeson Theater at the Museum of Contemporary Art had the option of watching the show either from the house or from tiers of seats set up on stage right, which is where I sat hoping for a close-up view of the puppets. Using human-scale figures on wheels, the performers sweep their characters (sometimes a single puppeteer manipulating two at once, like Gary as a child and his mother) swiftly from one part of the stage to another, reaching all spectators and setting a quick pace for the show with its many short scenes conveying a complex tale. Some staging takes place at the back of the house, requiring audience members seated there to twist around to see it. This includes a periodically returning snide clique of neighbors—puppets with goat and other animal heads—complaining about the strange food smells and other unseemly (in other words “un-French,” foreign, or Jewish) habits they detect emanating from Gary and his mother’s apartment. The back of house is also used for Gary’s mother to send the fabled posthumous wartime letters, which the puppet mother lights on fire and sets traveling down the side of the theater wall along a string.

A collection of nine separate projection screens hangs over the stage. When brought down simultaneously (as they are on and off throughout the show), they can create a single large screen across the proscenium for projections. At several points the screen captures the danger of wartime pilot Gary’s flights, with projected vintage footage of bombing raids. The central screen opens amidst these moving images to reveal the human actor who plays the adult Gary (Brice Berthoud) flying his plane while, simultaneously in the midst of battle, writing to his mother or working on one of his novels. From the vantage point of the stage audience, in scenes like these one gets a clear Brechtian view of the apparatus that come together to create the stage illusions—Gary sits atop a large ladder placed behind the screen. The show’s multiple staging choices and devices express the many angles from which one might consider the story and “facts” of Gary’s life. Showing the creation of illusion also reflects back on the ways Gary constructed both his novels and the fictions of his own history. At one point, screen projections show the letters of his birth name, along with a few additions rearranging in various configurations, while the voice of Gary’s mother critiques each new potential pseudonym as it forms. Is it distinguished or French enough? The show presents her as a woman impressing on her son the high expectations she holds for him, achievements the real Gary, to a great extent, actually attained. It also reveals Gary remaking himself to fit into and be respected by French society as a lifelong project.

At numerous points the show presents several Gary figures simultaneously: one actor playing Gary, wearing an iconic red suit, and another wearing the same suit and a mask with a face identical to that of the Gary performer. When Gary finds out about the Goncourt prize going to Ajar, his ruse ostensibly putting him in legal jeopardy, two identical Garys confront each other: One of the projection screens lifts up, creating an opening in the screen wall, revealing a brooding Gary on each side of it. They first move in mirrorlike unison but end up facing off against one another, one pulling a gun on his doppelganger. 

There is so much packed into this fast-paced and intricate show that my viewing left me wishing to see it a second time (perhaps this time from the house) to fully take in and contemplate all this material and how its diverse, inventive, and entertaining choices, masterfully executed by multitalented performers, were not just telling the story but reflecting on questions of identity, fictional creation, and the psychic scars of prejudice. With this show, Les Anges au Plafond (whose successful 2000 production Le Cri Quotidien, or The Daily Cry, performed at several US venues) is taking their puppetry into ambitious territory. While the production seemed to leave some spectators I spoke with puzzled, the depth of thinking that went into it perhaps requires audiences to meet it with an equal amount of patience and dedication. The show demonstrates how the broad realm of aesthetic options that are part of a contemporary understanding of puppetry can tackle complicated themes worth taking the time to ponder.