Fishbowl

Lo spettacolo vincitore del premio Molière per la commedia nel 2017

Una produzione di Pierre Guillois
Scritto da Agathe L’Huillier e Olivier Martin-Salvan
Molière Award for Best Comedy (2017)

C’era una volta… in tre piccoli attici parigini adiacenti, un omone, uno spilungone mingherlino e una bionda sensuale sono vicini di casa. Potrebbe essere una storia romantica, in un mondo normale, se non fosse per il fatto che questi tre curiosi personaggi rivelano un talento speciale per mandare le cose in malora… Un disastro dopo l’altro, in mezzo ad un diluvio di scherzi e situazioni esilaranti, questo trio improbabile cerca disperatamente per salvarsi tutto ciò che assomiglia all’amore, alla vita, alla speranza…

In uno spettacolo fantasmagorico e folle, volano gli oggetti, i personaggi si schiantano a terra e il palcoscenico stesso diventa un disastroso campo di battaglia tra incendi, perdite d’acqua ,tempeste e incidenti ridicoli e inattesi che culminano in un apocalittico caos. Coinvolgenti, commoventi, irresistibilmente comici, i nostri tre anti-eroi ci colpiscono sempre vicino al cuore lasciandoci piangere dalle risate dall’inizio alla fine.

The Guardian
It won a Molière award in its native France – although a Jacques Tati award might have been more appropriate. Fishbowl is a wordless comedy about three neighbours living at the top of a Parisian apartment block. We see their cramped quarters and the rooftop overhead. We watch as they defend their independence from one another then abandon it, fall in love, party, piss each other off and steal each other’s biscuits. Laura Léonard’s set is a box of tricks and the three performers rival it with unexpected dexterity.
For most of its 75 minutes, you don’t feel you’re watching a story. It’s more like a montage of domestic incidents as this trio lead their cheek-by-jowl lives. One tenant spills bleach into her goldfish bowl, triggering a chaotic chain reaction across the three flats; there’s the day she goes sunbathing on the roof, casting her birdwatching neighbour as a peeping Tom; and the night of the communal knees-up, with comedy dancing in the corridor and love rivalry punctuated by frequent visits to the shared loo.
The pleasure in Pierre Guillois’s production is in large part about special effects and comic choreography, as wigs are whipped away by the wind, burst pipes extinguish pan fires on the other side of the room, and – nice running joke, this – a hi-tech toilet is activated (intentionally or otherwise) by handclap. The performances are endearing, too, although harder to read if you’re not in the front rows of the vast Pleasance Grand.
It’s only latterly that anything resembling a plot – or point – takes shape, as one among the trio bursts the bubble, breaking free to a life elsewhere. Retroactively, the show is revealed as a ships-passing moment in these people’s lives; the time when they were everything to one another without realising it – or that it would end. In that light, the penultimate scene comes as a surprise, before raising the stakes and delivering a satisfying finale. The last scene is unnecessary, adding little to this timeless silent comedy about the farce and forced intimacies of crowded urban living.

The Scotsman
Judging by the packed full house in one of the largest non-traditional festival spaces in Edinburgh during August, this established French comedy hit – and winner of the Molière Award for Best Comedy Play in 2017 – needs no additional boost upon its transfer to the UK. Yet it’s worth taking time to eulogise it anyway, because this is a perfectly-pitched piece of physical character comedy; as wonderfully light and accessible as an Ealing comedy, yet with a sharp edge and moments of real emotional power and occasional Pythonesque darkness.
Set amid the particularly-styled attic bedsits of Paris, three people live in closet-sized rooms adjacent to one another. One (Olivier Martin-Salvan) is a burly man with the comedically grandiose air of Matt Berry about him, who lives in a hermetic white apartment with a toilet which is summoned from under the bed by a handclap; the second, Pierre Guillois, a slovenly, professorial-looking gent who lives amid squalor and owns an incredibly unfortunate goldfish; and the third, Agathe L’Huillier’s just-arrived young woman, whom the other pair are predictably smitten by, despite her inability to deliver beauty treatments which are anything but dangerous.
All three apartments, plus stairway, communal toilet and a roof which sees some hair-raising action, are built together in one claustrophobic set, and the way the cast interact between them is a joy to uncover; with, for example, Martin-Salvan’s character stealing Guillois’ food through the ventilation hatch, to the latter’s confusion, or a bravura moment of mistaken peeping tom identity which manages to boil the sleaziness out of the genuine comedy of Benny Hill.
Masterfully related in few words, this joyously universal work runs the gamut from toilet humour (in a very literal sense) to the sad, austere juxtaposition of the starving Guillois debating eating his pet rabbit while the other pair begin a romance, to an ultimately very charming look at the bonds of community which form between strangers who have been thrown together by their choice of address.
It seems inevitable that it will be viewed as one of this year’s big successes.