Belleville

by Amy Herzog

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 25 January 2018

Michael Longhurst directs Imogen Poots as Abby, James Norton as Zack, Malachi Kirby as Alioune and Faith Alabi as Amina in this one-act ply from 2011, receiving its first London production.

Zack and Abby are a young American couple renting a flat in Belleville, a suburb of Paris. Alioune, the landlord, and his wife Amina live downstairs with their two young children. The flat is not exactly seedy, but it is rather down at heel, and untidy. 

As Abby comes home early from a yoga class at which no-one turned up (she is the instructor) she is surprised to find Zack at home, taking an unschedued afternoon off from his word as a medical researcher. The fact that he is watching porn on his computer is the proximate cause of tension between them, but we are soon aware that almost anything can cause tension between the two - they are articulate and full of a sense of their own entitlement, even though they are by no means self-confident. Abby talks too much, masking real pain with wordy self-analysis; Zack is nervous, evasive, and very ready to relieve his anxiety by smoking marijuana. 

Matters take a darker turn when their landlord appears. He and Abby do not communicate well as her endless verbiage is beyond his skill with English; then, over shared smoking, he confronts Zack about the non-payment of rent. Zack is made even more ill-at-ease about this, but attempts to disguise his worries in Abby's presence because he sees her as too fragile to deal with the problem. And so, through a dangerous mixture of false protectiveness, ashamed defensiveness, and a misplaced breezy assurance that things cannot get beyond their control, the young coule is revealed to be dangerously adrift. Later revelations only confirm this impression, and the glimmer of a possibility of renewed tenderness and mutual forbearance and understanding is too fragile to survive.

The programme notes include an extended essay on 'millennials'; part of the point of the play, no doubt, is to expose the shaky foundations on which modern young people can base their expectations. But I suspect it was ever thus - one has only to consider both the couples (young and middle -ged) in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to recognise variations of the same situation. In Belleville Zack's and Abby's insecurities are perhaps exacerbated by their decision to re-create their lives in a foreign city. The influx of reality is thus all the sharper because they have less to fall back on at such a distance from their original home. Zack's dissimulations in particular lead to a fateful misconstrual on Abby's part of Amina's  increasing contempt for her American tenants, which just adds to her simmering resentment of Zack.

The performances are very good - I judge this partly by how irritated I was by both Zack and Abby most of the time, but both James Norton and Imogen Poots were able to reveal that there was more to their characters than just self-absorption. Malachi Kirby managed the embarrassment caused by having accepted the friendship of an unreliable tenant, which compromised his effectiveness as a business-like landlord, while Faith Alabi gave a masterclass in how to show disdain with a mere click of the tongue. Without doubt hers was the most grounded character of the four, a compelling contrast to the misguided hedonism of the others. 

The denouement is perhaps too melodramatic - it curtails a play that might otherwise have explored the possibility of development in the relationship more fully - and this renders it less than a great play, but it is in the fine tradition of plays in which life in Paris is no idyll for the young.