The Concise Köchel (review)

Translator Linda Gaboriau brings to the English-speaking world some of the most challenging and innovative plays from the contemporary drama of Quebec. One of her more recent projects is The Concise Köchel, her translation of Le Petit Köchel by Normand Chaurette. This play is a new exploration of the metatheatrical themes for which this author is famous. His experiments in metatheatre date back to his 1981 work, Provincetown Playhouse, July 1919. In this play, characters actually murder a child during a play, when they believe that they are merely acting out the murder. This self-conscious attention to the performance event coincides with theories of metatheatre proposed by Lionel Abel. By drawing attention to self-conscious performance—and by blurring the boundaries between the real and the theatrical—Chaurette calls into question the very nature of performance itself. The Concise Köchel similarly explores metatheatre and child murder. However, this more recent play is based around an almost religious ritual, rather than a more typical theatre event (a play in a playhouse). The most distinguishing feature of this play, though, is Chaurette's adept use of the theme of repeating, reflected in the characters, plot structure, and language.

According to the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (the playwrights' guild of Quebec), Le Petit Köchel is Chaurette's newest play. It follows the difficult decision of two sets of sisters: Lili and Cecile Motherwell, musicians, and Anne and Irene Brunswick, purportedly musicologists who serve as the Motherwells' patrons. These four women live in an alternate reality, a "world of music," that isolates them from other people and yet comforts them through its endless rituals of practice and repeating. Somewhere in the past, though, one of them dropped the rigor of rehearsing and gave birth to a son. The text never specifies whose son the young man is; however, he knows from birth that he comes second to Mozart. Guilt over parental neglect leads the women to be overly indulgent, even to the point of providing their son with two young women to cannibalize.

The play ostensibly begins on Halloween, shortly after the murder of the two young women, when the house has begun to smell and the crime can no longer be hidden. The young man has promised his mothers that he will hang himself. This decision is greeted with relief by the women, who view it as a way to be rid of both crime and criminal and to keep intact their world of music. However, before he will hang himself, he demands a promise: the mothers must eat his body after he is dead. The young man then makes an even more taxing demand: after he has been eaten, he will require that the women reenact, again and again, the evening of his death.

The play's ending makes for shocking theatre. Before he kills himself, the son leaves provisions for the time when the women will no longer have his corpse left at their reenactments; at that point, they must burn a page from their Mozart book, "The Concise Köchel," one page per performance. When the audience sees Irene Brunswick burn a page at the end of the play, it becomes apparent that the events just witnessed happened long ago, that the actions were in fact a reenactment, and that the women did carry through with their gruesome promise and are now confined to an endless prison of repeating their crime.

The ending is especially satisfying because it emerges so naturally as an explanation of the idiosyncrasies of the text. Throughout the play, characters repeat themselves, correct each other, and prompt each other in a way that befits a performance event. The text specifies that the reenactments are not recreated from a script; instead, the women rediscover their lines as they relive the event through ritual.

Chaurette expertly employs the motif of rehearsing/repetition as a metaphor that explains these women's lives, first as musicians and music lovers, and then as child...