The Empire Builders

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The Empire Builders, written by the extraordinary jazz-era polymath Boris Vian, is an adventurous play. Many of its choices are bold; others are mystifying. This is not necessarily a bad thing in absurdist theatre, but this production commits to an aesthetic so comprehensively that it misses some interesting opportunities.

The building occupied by the Dupont family is both their home and prison; only their young daughter seems to remember the outside world at all. A father, mother, daughter and maid, accompanied by a mysterious, martyr-like human receptacle for the family's frustrations, arrive at their new apartment after fleeing their previous one, pursued by a nightmarish, unexplained noise. This is the latest of many such evacuations and more and more is left behind each time. As the play goes on, the family dwindles, and the Dupont patriarch's sense of denial begins to crumble. 

Produced by Theatre Hayal Perdesi and performed entirely in Turkish, The Empire Builders splits the audience's attention between projected surtitles and an emotional kaleidoscope of performances. The staging imaginatively embraces minimalism, with each of the Duponts' apartments constructed and reconstructed from reams of tape before our eyes. 

The sound that provokes such terror in the Duponts has been taken as a metaphor for everything from death's inevitability to the legacy of the Holocaust, but the play doesn't belabour any particular symbolism. This is fair, but it leaves the final monologue, which veers into political territory, seeming at odds with the rest of the play.