Binôme – Souris Chaos

★★
theatre review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 18 Aug 2014

These days marriages of art and science take place in the cause of public consciousness raising. Forget cyborgs and starships, this new breed of sci-fi is far closer to sci-fact.

French theatre company, Le Sens des Mots, have been partnering playwrights with scientists to create a whole series of sci-fact plays of which one, the result of an artistic liaison between pathophysiologist Daniela Cota and the playwright Frédéric Sonntag, is Souris Chaos. Pathophysiologists, just in case you don't know, study fat people. Evidently this is a play designed with French men and international audiences in mind because, as everyone knows, French women don't get fat.

Cota's experiments involve giving mice cannabis (they must be such tiny, tiny little spliffs) which makes them very fat, and these fat mice are called Souris Chaos.

Anyhow, at the centre of the play is a sort of Homme Chaos. He is a presenter of a cookery programme specialising in the kind of food which makes everybody, except French women, fat. As two other presenters prepare un béchamel sauce parfait live on stage (quels artistes!), he recounts a surreal story about becoming so fat he manages to lose his lover between his love handles. Merde! At this point in the proceedings Sonntag realises that he hasn't managed to shove all the science in. So the actors (all French, but performing in English) start shouting an unadulterated list of everything that is making us fat. And it seems absolutely everything is making us fat.

En bref: Sorry Chaos.