Tonight I attended a play titled “Incendies” which means “Fires”. It is the story of a will. The will left by a woman to her twin children. We learn that this woman had not spoken for the last five years of her life. Her children seem very angry with her. In the will she asks her daughter to find their father and give him a letter enclosed in the will and she asks her son to find their brother. Everyone was under the impression that those two had been dead a long time.
Weaved into the play we see the deceased as a young girl, then a mature woman and, eventually, as an old woman. We see how her first born was a love child taken away from her at birth. We follow her as she leaves her village to get an education and returns to carve her grandmother’s name on her head stone. Later she leaves to try to find her son. She is caught up in very violent political clashes. Three different actresses play her at different ages… It is half narrative and half action. In one incredible scene there is a sprinkler on the stage as it is a summer garden scene. It is spurting water on the back wall…then you notice our heroine standing there, her back to the wall and she gets hit by the water jets back and forth as she describes a massacre that she witnessed and the water becomes the riffle shots…and then the blood spurting…
There are many poignant scenes describing how she was made prisoner and tortured and raped, how her friend becomes a suicide bomber…
We find out that she stopped talking after attending the trial of one of the perpetrators of these atrocities.
A strange character appears…a crazed killer who enjoys shooting people in order to photograph them…
As the story unfolds we learn that her twins were the result of a rape while she was in prison…The twins learn as we do who this man, their father is…and who the crazed sniper is…he is one and the same…but he is also their brother…a very oedipian story: the mother looses track of her son, they are reunited without knowing who the other is and, in this case, the son rapes his mother…
The story takes place in part in some Arab country yet the tone and the language are very real and close to us…To relieve the tension from time to time the notary misquotes some old sayings or mispronounces some foreign sounding words.
The final tableau has all the actors sitting all in a row on wooden chairs (that were used as props through the play) it starts to rain so they pull a plastic cover over their heard in silence…and then the lights slowly fade to darkness…
It is a powerful play…troubling…hauntingly beautiful… I am still wondering why it was called Incendies when the theme that was recurrent was water…not fire…