Productions » La Bête
Manoel Theatre, Valletta, December 2001
Directed by Jes Camilleri
Presented in collaboration with the Manoel Theatre
David Hirson’s La Bête is widely regarded as one of the most controversial and original American plays produced on Broadway in the last twenty years. Written in rhyming iambic-pentameter couplets, La Bête recounts the arrival of a vulgar street performer, Valere, into an elite company of veteran actors. The battles between Elomire, the troupe’s leader, and Valere provide the basis for an antic comedy questioning the divide between art and entertainment.
(Photography : Darrin Zammit Lupi)
The audience is transported to 17th century France but the curiously skewed set adds a disconcerting aspect to the play. The essence of Hirson’s theme is essentially the decline and fall of culture in a West where “mediocrity is bound to thrive/while excellence must struggle to survive.”
