Juliette of the spirits

What is it about French actresses? Outside of Vanessa Redgrave, we simply don’t have an English actress who gives herself in body and soul to an audience as Juliette Binoche does. Or Isabelle Huppert. Or Charlotte Gainsbourg. Or even Isabelle Adjani.

And if there’s a more astonishing performance on the stage this year than Binoche’s in the curiously under-acclaimed in-i at the National Theatre, I look forward to hearing about it.

I caught the show, belatedly, at a Sunday matinee, obviously a successful innovation as the place was jam-packed. The South Bank was jam-packed, period. And not with tourists. Everyone seemed to be local, out on a spree, spending like billy-o, credit crunch be damned. I’ve not seen anything quite like it. There was even a paraplegic basket ball game on the free theatre greensward. 

Inside, the Lyttelton crowd was more international, and markedly young and enthusiastic. Binoche and Akram Khan were received after ninety minutes of love-sick angst and ecstasy with a resounding ovation that brought them back to the stage three, if not four, times.  

It’s a bit of a mismatch, to be truthful. The show is really about Binoche not finding love in her life. Or at least finding it and not keeping it. Khan’s prose soliloquy of being awkward about fancying a white girl is pallid and feeble in comparison.

Khan is a neat, compact dancer who does some extraordinary things, such as a sort of corkscrew solo trying to disengage his body from his own head. As a non-actor who’s acting, though, he’s embarrassing.

As a non-dancer, Binoche, on the other hand, is simply amazing. She flows in a tumult to the end of her limbs and towards the audience. Like all good natural dancers she is slightly ahead of herself, and the beat, on each movement. And she communicates joy and despair, and sheer blazing personality, with utter spontaneity and freshness.

The extraordinary scene where she is magically pinned to the wall in her greatcoat, legs three feet off the ground, recounting the jealousy of her boyfriend by grabbing her own crutch as if it were his, is a masterpiece of expressive acting.

And the pursuit of Khan in the cinema and beyond, where she focuses on his bald head while watching Fellini’s Casanova and charges after him in an erotic frenzy, is a superbly skittish and super-charged sequence.

The falling out of love process as registered in a disenchantment with each others’ toilet habits is a comic invention only possible in dance; it would be awful in words.

And the constant switch back between aggression and passivity, a feature of contemporary European dance from Pina Bausch to William Forsythe, is a perfect way of uncovering character flaws and emotional neediness in the two dancers, though only Binoche stands truly revealed at the end.

In-i is not perfect, and it’s very short, barely 65 minutes playing time. But it is utterly intriguing and, at the very least, an unmissable performance by one of the most brilliant and enchanting actresses of our day.

The show is played out against the wonderfully simple scenic square of Anish Kapoor, which moves inmperceptibly up and down the stage, changing colour from red and orange to purple and olive green like a series of Rothko paintings, and the music by Philip Sheppard — plangent, cello-based swells of oceanic proportions — is absolutely tremendous.