Review: L'Addition

“Your right is our left,” Bert and Nasi explain to the audience, brows quizzically furrowed. “And it’s going to be like that the whole time.” The performance duo is busy telling us, at length, precisely what they’re about to perform: a single scene, in which a waiter pours a customer too much wine. Absurd, hilarious and smugly frustrating, L’Addition (that’s ‘the bill’, in French) makes a virtue of complicating the simplest things; a white tablecloth, the concept of stage left, an empty wine glass, the act of ‘serving’ a waiting audience… I mean, customer.

Directed by Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, a man with a strong back catalogue in theatre which loops a single scene ad infinitum, L’Addition wrings every possible drop of variety out of its wine-sodden napkins. The person sitting down is the customer, the person standing is the one who serves, we all agree, before Bert and Nasi ping-pong (in)between roles with gleeful elasticity. It’s all in celebration of ‘too much’ – finding humour in overspill, slapstick in mess, and sloshy caricatures in expressions of decadence and disgust. “Shit shit shit!” they chorus, as imaginary wine goes imaginary everywhere. This is Faulty Towers as Rorschach test: you could call it an intricate dance between the power dynamics at play in transactional acts of service, but “it’s simple!” they tell us. A customer sits, a waiter pours, and wrong is right.