Review: In ‘Amours (2),’ Love Hurts

A new stage production by Joël Pommerat is always an event in France. At 60, he is widely recognized as one of the greatest directors and playwrights working in the country today, a theater maker with rare box-office appeal. Yet unlike many of his peers, Pommerat hasn’t parlayed this success into an ever busier schedule of new productions.

Since 2015, he has brought just three new plays to domestic and international stages, starting with his French Revolution-inspired juggernaut “It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis.” This month, he is back in Paris with a much more modest endeavor: “Amours (2)” (“Loves (2)”), a 70-minute medley of fragments from Pommerat’s previous works, reinvented for an audience of around 40.

This shrunken scale doesn’t make “Amours (2),” which is nominated for best public-sector production at this year’s Molière theater awards, any less effective. If anything, it showcases Pommerat’s art — his taut writing, delivered in piercing vignettes — more intimately than ever.

The show isn’t performed on a traditional stage: The production requires merely a backdrop and chairs on three sides of a square space. (In Paris, it was staged at Pavillon Villette, a venue often rented out for receptions and conferences.) There were practical reasons for this format: “Amours (2)” is a reworking of “Amours (1),” a production that Pommerat created at a French prison in 2019.

Pommerat has been working with prisoners in Arles, southern France, for nearly a decade. His first two collaborations featured full casts drawn from the jail there, and were performed inside the prison for small audiences. But the security and logistics for these events were demanding, and prison officials asked for a simpler setup for “Amours (1).”

Four years later, two of the prisoners he worked with in Arles — Jean Ruimi and Redwane Rajel — have been released, and are working as professional actors with Pommerat’s theater troupe, the Louis Brouillard Company. “Amours (2)” starts with those actors seated in the audience.

As a spokeswoman finishes a preshow announcement, Rajel’s irritated voice rises: “Just stop!” He and Ruimi, playing Rajel’s father, launched into an argument — apologizing along the way for the disruption, as if it were a spontaneous exchange. (Some onlookers believed it was, and tried to shush them.)

Three actresses join Ruimi and Rajel and the show plays out in a dozen scenes between two or three characters, drawn from earlier Pommerat pieces: “This Child” (2006), “Circles/Fictions” (2010) and “The Reunification of the Two Koreas” (2013). Love, the overarching theme, takes many forms throughout, from intense friendship to filial affection and long-term companionship.

Yet it is consistently laced with pain and misunderstanding. In one scene, a deep rift opens up between two best friends because their recollections of their first meeting differ. In another vignette, two neighbors wait for their spouses to return, until it dawns on them that the missing partners are having an affair.

While Pommerat has honed a distinctive stage aesthetic over the years, with dusky lighting and an eerie, quietly cutting delivery style for actors, “Amours (2)” does away with technical wizardry and goes back to basics. The plain, bright lighting and compact space lessens the distance between the audience and highlights the spare yet mysterious quality of Pommerat’s writing.

The three women onstage — Marie Piemontese, Elise Douyère and Roxane Isnard — are all faultless, with Isnard an especially versatile presence from scene to scene, projecting teenage anger as easily as quiet, mature tension. Yet Ruimi and Rajel, the two former convicts, bring a different dimension to “Amours (2).”

Ruimi, a former high-profile member of a Marseille crime ring who served a lengthy sentence in connection with several killings and drug trafficking, draws attention with a nervy intensity. When he plays vulnerable characters — like a man paying daily visits to his amnesiac wife, who keeps forgetting who he is — his toughness almost seems to crack in real time.

Rajel, who has also performed roles with the French director Olivier Py, is a softer presence, with a gift for delivering quiet blows in dialogue. “Amours (2)” is a testament to Ruimi and Rajel’s talent and hard work, yet their life experiences shape their stage presence, too.

That is one of the benefits of social diversity in the arts. It’s an uphill struggle for actors from tough backgrounds to make it as professionals, with drama schools increasingly out of financial reach in Europe and the United States. Yet their presence make for richer, fuller worlds onstage. “Amours (2)” is certainly proof, and is bound to become another Pommerat classic.

Amours (2)

Through April 22 at W.I.P. Villette in Paris, then touring France through June 9.

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