Liz Nicholls told us in her ‘Guileless Guide to Fearless Fringe Foraging’ that we are to find this production of Evelyne de la Cheneliere’s play Bashir Lazhar ‘moving.’ I must be a cretin. I found it tedious and assaultive.
Do I sympathize with the plight of Canadian immigrants whose applications for refugee status are unjustly denied, and teachers who have the courage to try out innovative and rigorous teaching techniques with their students? Of course I do. I am not so fond, however, of being assaulted at the theatre. Don’t get me wrong: I’d pay big money for a time-travelling ticket that would allow me to see Peter Weiss’s original Marat/Sade, or either of Heiner Muller’s productions of Hamletmachine, or, for that matter, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II at the Rose theatre in 1593. (Did Pembroke’s men stage an anal rape with a poker or not?) But the assault that this production delivers is of another kind entirely, one particularly offensive to anyone who cares about dramatic writing as a verbal art.
From the opening moments, the audience is subjected to an aural assault — initially, the din of children playing in a schoolyard at recess, but there are all kinds of din to follow, including the shouting that Michael Peng subjects us to as surrogates for characters in the fiction at whom Bashir is yelling. It’s hard to imagine that de la Cheneliere’s script calls for all of the racket and distraction for which Piet Defraeye’s direction provides, which includes Peng having to stride rapidly back and forth across a stage strewn thick with papers, jangling the audience’s nerves with both the crunching of the paper and his motion while he rants at us about something. Surely de la Cheniere wants audiences to be able to hear and digest her words. The play is, after all, about a teacher trying to impart the correct use of language and an understanding of fables to his students.
It doesn’t help that there isn’t much modulation to Peng’s performance, or that he throws away important lines such as the one in which we learn that his family died in a house fire the night before they were to begin their covert journey out of Algeria to join him in Canada. It also doesn’t help that the mostly non-verbal role of Alice is played by Kim McLeod as if the character were eight or nine rather than twelve or thirteen. And it must be asked: what exactly is the point of hitting audience members in the head with paper airplanes? Are we to imagine that we are towering figures threatened with a jet-fuelled inferno if we don’t more readily grant asylum to political refugees from the Arab world?
All in all, an exhausting affair that left this audience member feeling like a lamb that had been unjustly devoured by a wolf of a production. To make matters worse, I now feel that to do justice to de la Cheniere’s play I’ll have to go read it and imagine for myself a production of it that doesn’t leave one feeling as if one has spent an hour and a half in an asylum.
Labonneviveuse 
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