Bert & Nasi: L’Addition at Lowry

A customer orders a drink from a waiter. The waiter pours it. That’s the crux of the action in L’Addition, a play where a commonplace interaction fractures into an absurdist kaleidoscope of perspectives.

“As hilarious, horrible, weird and beautiful as the rest of this world”. That’s how the duo Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas describe their brand of theatre, which toys with the mechanisms of theatre like a cat with a mouse. In L’Addition, that manifests in the form, with a single, mundane scene holding a mirror to the incoherent, nonsensical, and comical nature of life as they see it.

Directed by Tim Etchells, leader of Sheffield’s Forced Entertainment, the scene is played over and over, quickly spinning out of control. Who is serving and who’s being served? Roles flip back and forth in a tug-of-war of power dynamics. Endless misunderstandings call the very act of communication into question. Is this a nightmarish spiral or a grotesque farce?

The title translates as ‘the bill’, and the question of who should pay it drives an ending that’s alert to the theatre’s own transaction: the audience has paid to see these two performers at work. Read in English, the title also names the show’s method: theatre by addition, piling variation on variation so that what starts as a single, unremarkable scene becomes a kind of parable about the social scripts that govern our world.

Bert & Nasi are a contemporary performance duo that met in 2015 and have since created an entire repertoire of shows that strip performance down to its barest elements, reflecting, they say, a decade of national and international austerity. But from simple materials, they tease out complex ideas and emotions, delivered within explosive and often hilarious performances.

The New York Times called them “Very weird and extremely funny”. The Guardian, in its four star review of the show, said “This superbly absurd comedy is waitering for Godot”. Perfect for anyone looking to be served something a bit different.