How agonizing is it when you feel nothing? Eline Arbo adapted James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’

‘I’m a man! I’m a man! I’m a man!” Goosebumps rise on your arms at the desperation bordering on madness with which actor Eelco Smits shouts four empty words at his opponent – and again, and again. It’s as if the character hopes that by repeating it often enough, the phrase might just come to mean something.

Smits plays David, the narrator in James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room from 1956, now staged at ITA by Eline Arbo, very faithful to that novel. The opening image in the book and the performance is identical: David is standing in front of a window, but he cannot look outside because it is too dark for that. He only sees himself reflected in the glass.

In Giovanni’s Room Baldwin explored the feeling of emptiness, the inability to feel, that he saw many people, especially white people, struggle with. Because emotions cannot be selectively anesthetized, people who do not dare to face their deepest fears must also do without feelings of passion, zest for life and love, was his premise.

The torment that this causes, that complete lack of feeling, and its potentially life-threatening consequences – that is one of the main themes of Giovanni’s Room.

Back to David for a moment. Mumbling, to no one in particular, he begins to talk about what he has been through in recent months. While his girlfriend Hella was traveling around Spain to think about his marriage proposal, he himself unexpectedly fell head over heels for an Italian bartender in Paris. Mutual. He finds his homosexuality or bisexuality difficult to tolerate. The bulk of the story describes how David, who is stuck between his obsession with Giovanni (that’s the bartender’s name) and his own internalized homophobia, tries to leave Giovanni’s rented room, where he moved in almost immediately.

When we meet David, in front of that mirrored window, he has succeeded. Giovanni is about to be put to death for murder, indirectly through David, because if he had been a little less concerned with himself and a little more with Giovanni, he could have prevented it.

What Baldwin also shows with this is that it is – also – a privilege to wallow in your inability to feel anything. Giovanni, who comes from a lower social class and who does not, like David, have a father to whom he can turn for some extra money, cannot afford such detachment at all. He’s simply too busy keeping himself alive.

Connect

Anyway, this is about a character who fails to connect with his own feelings, let alone those of others. That makes Giovanni’s Room not necessarily a very theatrical story. It is visibly hard work for Eelco Smits, who, due to a lack of connection with his opponents, has to gather almost every impulse from himself. With wonderful abandon, the actor fights his way across the virtually empty performance floor (scenography Roel Van Berckelaer), accompanied by fantastically composed (composition Thijs van Vuure) and very beautifully performed and sung electronic music by the players themselves.

It is moving, the way in which Smits becomes a body in that cold, masturbatory hall of mirrors. That squeezes itself into uncomfortable positions and keeps undressing and undressing and undressing itself. We hear the character speak about a dingy room, about walls and opaque windows, about dirt and filth, but what we see is: space. One large, open space, containing that body. This man can go either way. Nothing prevents him. The walls and the filth are in his head.

The determination with which David tries to get himself to feel is reinforced by Arbo with fairly heavy theatrical artillery: stage smoke, synthesizers, rain machines, a stroboscope. It gives the performance dynamism, but also feels powerless in a way. As if the emotional flatness of the character became so unbearable for the makers that they wanted to compensate for it with theatrical bombast.

With wonderful abandon, the actor fights his way across the virtually empty stage floor

Intimacy

Arbo also seems to have yielded to humanity in Giovanni’s performance. In the book, Giovanni remains a mirage. We see him through David’s eyes: he’s beautiful, he’s mysterious… that’s about it. When Giovanni tells something about his own history for the first time, towards the end of the novel, it is more repulsive to David than it increases the intimacy between them.

Actor Jesse Mensah fills Giovanni with a benevolent personality. He gives Giovanni the agency that Baldwin consciously withholds from him. Mensah’s Giovanni sparkles, he has humor, he is down-to-earth and witty and open-hearted. Unlike David, he is completely in tune with his body and his sexuality. It’s a relief. Giovanni is the true, round man, in this interpretation. It is thanks to his presence that this performance, in addition to coldness and deadness, also exudes a zest for life.

When David arrives in his narrative at the moment when Giovanni is tilted over the chopping block of the guillotine, the window in front of which David is standing also tilts in this staging. For a moment we catch a glimpse of ourselves in it. In this way, Arbo gently pushes Baldwin’s ideas towards the viewer. How comfortable are we with our own reflection in the mirror? How panicky, for what might reveal itself to us there?

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