Dolan Cummings
posted 10 November 2005

It us hard to know whether Exquisite Pain is art as therapy or therapy as art or a study in the relationship between the two. It works best as the last of these.

This is the first project for which Forced Entertainment have used a 'text', and in keeping with the company's unruly character - their last piece was appropriately titled Bloody Mess - it is an odd one. Exquisite Pain is a collection of stories assembled by the French artist Sophie Calle, in the form of a repeated exchange between her own story of heartbreak, rendered a little differently each time, and other people's tales of the times they suffered most.

In Forced Entertainment's production, two actors - Jerry Killick and Cathy Naden for this performance - sit at tables with a bottle of water each, and simply read from their scripts, with a single image for each story displayed on screens above their heads. I lost count of the number of times Naden repeated Calle's story, under a picture of a red telephone, though by the end the audience's suppressed groan at each repetition was very much part of the performance.

Long story short, Calle got dumped. Even in multiple renderings, however, what's interesting is what she leaves out as much as what she puts in. Calle clearly doesn't think it's particularly interesting that her lover was much older than her; he was a friend of her father's and she'd had a crush on him in childhood, finally 'seducing' him when she was 30. And while she refers frequently to the fact that she wore a wedding dress on their first night together, only once does she come close to explaining why. She is much more interested in the cruel manner in which he dumped her, and especially fixated on his pathetic infected finger.

In 1984, Calle won a three-month study grant to go to Japan. Her lover, M, said he couldn't wait that long, that he would leave her, but when she insisted on going anyway, he agreed to meet her in India at the end of her trip. He called to confirm just before this meeting, but when she arrived, she received a telegram saying that he was in hospital back in France and that she was to call her father, an oncologist. When she finally got through to him, it transpired that M had only been in hospital briefly, with an infected finger. She called him at home and discovered that he had met someone else, serious he hoped.

There it is. Not a profound story, but you can see why she was upset. There are a lot of questions there, few of any of which are answered in Calle's various renderings of the tale. And perhaps that is the point. 'Moving on' means leaving questions unanswered, foregoing 'closure'. Rather than trying to understand why M did what he did, she tells us that she simply wants to keep telling the story until she's sick of it. That's the art as therapy part. As for therapy as art, there is something fascinating about observing the ebb and flow of emotion. Naden's performance is subtle; she lets the writing do all the work, or appear to.

There is a point somewhere between raw emotion and cool detachment at which the story becomes interesting. Rendered artlessly, other people's pain is just boring, but the therapeutic aim of achieving numb indifference is equally at odds with any artistic or literary sensibility. In between, and intermittently, the story becomes deeply engaging, moving and appalling. The other stories are variously pathetic, banal, and very funny. Some have the same fascinating quality that sometimes characterises Calle's own story, but the repetition of that story gives us a rare insight into this quality, which we tend to take for granted otherwise.

The overall experience is a strange one. Inevitably, the show is boring at times, though having members of the audience heading for the exits actually adds something to the pathos of the piece. It is the good bits that linger in the mind, however, in multiple versions.

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