(Jewish Group) Bernard-Henri Lvy on Anti-Semitism, American Elections, and the Future of Europe

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

There has always been a strong touch of theatre to Bernard-Henri Lévy. Known as B.H.L., the French philosopher, public intellectual, timber-fortune scion, style icon (he is the patron saint of the unbuttoned collar), and occasional punching bag (Garrison Keillor once called him “a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore”) is a walking, pontificating spectacle. So perhaps it was inevitable that he would take to the footlights. On Monday night, he makes his Off Broadway début, at the Public Theatre, in a one-night-only performance of a solo play called “Looking for Europe.”

“The pitch is the following,” Lévy said, by phone, from Paris the other day. “It’s a writer, a French writer, who is supposed to deliver the opening speech of a big conference organized by a group of American Democrats in Sarajevo. And this conference is about Europe: the decomposition, the collapse, and the future of Europe.” The writer, played by Lévy, spends the play’s hour and forty-five minutes in his hotel room, trying to write his speech. (The script, he noted, follows the three Aristotelian unities, beloved by Corneille and Racine: of time, of place, and of action.) “The story of the play is the story of the dead ends, the resumings, the reasserts, the false tracks, the false good ideas, whatever, that he’s trying in order to prepare this speech about Europe, about America, about the world as it is today.”

Why a piece of theatre, as opposed to an essay or a speech? Lévy explained, “A lot of things happen between the four walls of this hotel room, between the writer and himself, between the present and the past, between what he is supposed to deliver in one hour and events of his past life. The play is, in other words, a stream of consciousness.” It’s also a window into what life as a “rock-star philosopher” might be like. “He’s supposed to prepare this serious speech, but every five minutes he is disturbed by parasite thoughts, by souvenirs, and also by external interference. His phone rings constantly, e-mails arrive—from Paris, from New York, from outside the hotel—people who are urging him to hurry. His hosts tell him, ‘We are waiting for you! What the hell are you doing?’ And so on.”

The play is a variation of a piece first performed in 2014, called “Hôtel Europe.” It premièred at Sarajevo’s National Theatre, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and was performed by the actor Jacques Weber. It travelled to Venice’s Teatro La Fenice and Paris’s Théâtre de l’Atelier, and the next year Lévy himself performed an updated version in Ukraine, and a “much more Italian” edition at the Spoleto Festival. This past June, he performed yet another version at London’s Cadogan Hall, retitled “Last Exit Before Brexit” and revamped as a plea to Britons to remain in the European Union. “On that you can find easily some press, I suppose, on Google,” he said. (“It left many unfamiliar with the showman-philosopher somewhat nonplussed,” the Guardian reported.)

more...