Elle (review)

To inaugurate his new theatre company The Art Party, actor Alan Cumming presented his own adaptation of Jean Genet's early one-act Elle. Written in 1955 and never published or performed in Genet's lifetime, the play anticipates The Balcony, written two years later, in its focus on the ambiguities inherent to politics and gender roles. The dramatic irony here begins with the play's title, which refers to the traditionally male-exclusive figure of the pope as a woman. Genet uses the French papal honorific "Sainteté," a feminine noun, which leads to a greeting best translated as "her Holiness." Beginning with that built-in misidentification, the play tells the story of a photographer who comes to the Vatican to take the pope's picture and spread his (or her) image around the globe. Just as the photographers in The Balcony must show the fake bishop how to pose as one, here the real pope must work to satisfy the camera's demands. In the play's centerpiece, the "Laments of the Pope," Genet gives his pontiff a litany—brilliant in both its parody and invocation of Catholic ritual—baring the soul of the individual underneath the robes as he muses over his loss of self, the poor shepherd boy he once was. He entreats the photographer to describe his beautiful wife, a moment Cumming touchingly conveyed as a futile wish to live vicariously through the normal man before him, showing us the bargain this man made when he traded in his individuality for ultimate power and holiness. His identity crisis is so severe it is a running question throughout the play whether the pope even exists.

The lithe, boyish Cumming brought the play's dichotomies home in a grotesque over-the-top characterization, totally transforming himself physically and vocally into a hunched over, emaciated, shell of a man, leaning on his pontifical staff as a walking stick. Covered in whiteface and stumbling under heavy restrictive robes, he was reminiscent of Kabuki performance. The voice was perhaps the most commented-upon feature; his gravelly accent was described by critics as alternately Transylvanian, Yiddish and even "Pacino-esque." However, the character he was channeling was clearly that of the earthy Italian peasant indicated in Genet's text. The gusto with which he embraced the gross vernacular of the role also brought Genet tantalizingly close to the world of that other great Catholic political heretic of the theatre—Dario Fo.

The production inventively kept juxtaposing this vulgar, imminently mortal protagonist against the lavish feminine trappings of the institution of the papacy. Designer Tim Hatley's great scenic coup was Cumming's long-anticipated entrance; the stage-right wall folded down to provide a bed of roses and candles, a kind of runway for the pope, who literally glided in on roller-skates (a giddy touch stipulated by Genet). Against the impressive pomp of this spectacle, replete with deafening organ music and a blinding shrine of icons, Cumming's "prole-pope" emerged as quite a jarring and thought-provoking shock.

For the costumes, Cumming and director Nick Philippou recruited fashion maven Vivienne Westwood to lend the all-male cast some exaggerated feminine sensuality—the "sa" in "sa sainteté," as it were. The medieval garments of the attending Usher and Cardinal were cut more like gowns, markedly sinched at the waist. In contrast, Westwood gave the lay characters an almost cartoonish masculinity, stuffing the photographer's gray suit with broad pointy shoulder pads, for example, and giving him dark-rimmed glasses to highlight actor Anson Mount's resemblance to images of Clark Kent.

The pope himself was bedecked in a strapless affair, wrapped tightly around his torso under the arms. Moreover, in an even more surprising stroke, the garment was not so much backless as backside-less. One of the biggest laughs in Genet's script is when the pope explains how the Vatican does not even bother to waste cloth enough to cover his...