“I am a righteous person,” declares Lotte, the character played by Cate Blanchett in Botho Strauss’s play Big and Small (Gross und Klein), currently on show at Paris’s grand Théâtre de la Ville. The sentence is comic, Lotte having just been caught rifling through a dustbin, and grappling for an excuse to make the moment seem less awkward.
Yet in many ways there is a touch of the visionary, a prophetic kind of quality to Lotte. Her Candidean perspective on things pervades this delicious production of the play by the Sydney Theater Company, and invites the audience to step through the looking glass into an adult Alice’s world.
This month marks the beginning of the Sydney Theatre Company’s whistle-stop tour of Europe with a newly re-translated script by British playwright Martin Crimp, and direction by Benedict Andrews, considered one of Australia’s most innovative voices in theatre. The production received rapturous reviews from the Australian press when it opened in Sydney last autumn, and also sees Cate Blanchett performing on stage in Paris for the first time.
The play follows Lotte’s journey as she tries to seek out her estranged husband Paul, whom she loves obsessionally – and delusionally. Lotte’s tragedy is the experience of human grief but with all the emotional understanding of a child. Time has not helped her overcome that initial, raw and indeed childlike-inducing wave of helplessness brought about by grief – in Lotte’s case, her husband leaving her. She is literally, trapped, something the set design and choreography deliberately emphasizes. Lotte, for example, looking up from the street to the tower block of her childhood friend Meggy’s apartment (who barely remembers who she is), forced to wait outside as no one will let her in. Or Lotte, once finally in the building, as she peers through the glass door of the apartment block into the street outside.
Blanchett’s performance is magnetic. In scenes with music, Lotte gets carried away, dancing wildly, again with all the innocence of a child, only stopping when she realizes others are watching . As Blanchett dances away, running around the stage, Lotte’s raw passion is mesmerising.
The audience observes the dreary world around Lotte. The couples who argue with venom; the children who fight with their parents; a young woman who injects herself with heroin. In one scene, the voice of Meggy coming through the entry phone of her apartment block taunts Lotte, daring her to be cruel. But Lotte does not know how. She craves companionship, but the world gives her none.
In the final scene, the stage becomes a kind of claire-obscure, with Lotte, so striking with her pale skin, pale hair, and pale clothes, set in relief against the dreariness of those next to her, and the darkness around her. Lotte lights up the stage, and for those last moments of the play, we are almost convinced that she may very well be “righteous” after all.
“Big and Small” opens at the Barbican, London EC2 on 13 April
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