Lacrima

Fast fashion has been (rightly) castigated for its ecological wastefulness, its disposable nature and the human cost behind the sweatshops. Writer and director Caroline Guiela Nguyen argues that high fashion is little different.

British designer Alexander Schaaf wins the contract to design and deliver a wedding dress for an unnamed British princess. He turns to a Parisian atelier headed by Marion (an excellent Maud Le Grevellec). Her company will make the main part while engaging a French lace factory and Indian embroiderers for the rest. In this tense drama, we see this four work together under tight deadlines and extreme stress to produce a generation-defining garment.

Perhaps in an effort to create an immersive atmosphere reflecting the long days worked by everyone we see on stage, Nguyen seats us for three hours straight; there is a brief pause but it comes with a stern warning: “do not leave your seats” (people left their seats then returned). Despite this imposition, the time flies by as we swoosh back and forth from Paris to Mumbai, witnessing the epic strain under which this one-time dress is painfully put together.

There’s an international flavour throughout with the work performed in French, with scenes in French Sign Language, Tamil and English. Nguyen does well to delve deep into the human cost implicit in all three working environments. Marion works alongside her husband Julien (Dan Artus) but she barely has time for her daughter and her marriage falls apart after she has an affair with a co-worker.

Meanwhile, the expert Indian beadworker spending many thousands of hours stitching 250,000 natural pearls by hand ignores call after call from his own child and eventually goes blind. The lacemakers describe how their craft is dying out and their predecessors often lost their own sight by their mid-thirties. Tragedy is as much part of the wedding dress as deeply as any material.

A motif stretching through Lacrima (Italian for “tears”) is the weight borne by all involved, not least the garment. The Mumbai factory owner insists that the dress can’t bear so many pearls yet Alexander insists after an awkward Zoom call with the princess; all the while, he is being asked to conform with a tight budget and schedule. Onerous international laws which govern the working conditions of his employees, portrayed here as more to protect the reputation of the Western fashion houses than anything else, pile more pressure on him forcing him to make last-minute changes.

Things are hardly less fraught in Paris. Julien and his daughter feel emotionally abandoned by Marion; the former is seen as a coercive and embittered man who is eventually served a restraining order while the latter descends gradually into more disturbing forms of mental illness. The complete dedication of the lacemakers is contrasted with the way that one elderly worker has almost no idea what happened to her own sister after she moved away in her twenties and died shortly afterwards. And all for a dress that will only be seen for about half an hour.

It is heartbreaking to watch, the pain made deeply vivid by Alice Duchange’s set design that effortlessly brings us from location to location. A video screen serves as both the voice of disembodied parties in London or on the end of a phone or to zoom in on faces deep in concentration or thought. The lighting design from Jean-Baptiste Cognet, Teddy Gauliat- Pitois and Antoine Richard is dazzling, folding us into expansive set pieces followed by more intimate conversations.

Nguyen’s deeply engaging story has much to say but her most powerful points are somewhat diluted by the sheer amount of subplots and melodrama added in. In an era when even the most straightforward of plots can be stretched to an entire Netflix series, it’s not unexpected to see this kind of world-building but theatre audiences expect to see a little more focus on stage before scurrying home to catch up on their Netflix queue.

Lacrima appeared at Barbican Centre 25-27 September and is touring internationally.


Photo credit: Jean-Louise Fernandez