IT may be that there is a medium for the transmission of the first two of Anne Le Marquand Hartigan's works which make up this trilogy but, on the evidence available last night, it does not seem to be live theatre, and certainly not as here staged.
La Corbiere offers a woman (here the author) posing about a chaise longue from which trails a large semi circle of white cloth towards a jumble of furniture. There is a long blonde wig down stage right from which she occasionally addresses us, as she does from the chaise longue or the white cloth, in largely staccato monosyllables and occasional sentences about woman, whore, breast or sea, sand and such.
Neither words, nor actions create any intrinsic context and only the brief programme note reveals that the piece has been inspired by the death at sea of a boatload of prostitutes being brought to France from Jersey where they had been pleasuring the occupying Nazi troops.
Le Crapaud (in three actions) is similar in style and similarly lacks any narrative form or dramatic construction or development. The programme tells that it is derived from the building of fortifications and an underground hospital by men brought as virtual slaves to Jersey for that purpose.
Here Robert Gordon plays first a post war woman visiting the site as a tourist with children, then a Nazi guard overseeing the men and then one of the men in the slave gang. This time the furniture up stage is upright rather than jumbled and the same chaise longue remains more or less centre stage.
Les Yeux is played by both actors largely in a kind of nursery doggerel with occasional statements about a large eye, hung upstage on an easel, which lights up from time to time and observes events dispassionately (we are repeatedly reminded) as two French propaganda producing women are very slowly rumbled and imprisoned by those occupying Nazis.
The programme tells us they were extraordinary women. The script and its staging do not. Perhaps the best that can be said of it is that it suffered last night from serious under rehearsal.
