The Department Store

Justin Fleming is one of the most strikingly original and poetically inventive of modern Australian playwrights. The Department Store is his free adaptation of Emile Zola’s Au Bonhuer Des Dames. In his hands, this classic of 19th century French Literature is transformed into a modern theatrical parable of globalization and corporatisation and their impact on individuals and sense of community.

Octave Mouret is a retail entrepreneur with the golden touch. His charm, skill and insight are irresistible. He is apparently the perfect coporate conquerer – making money and bedding women with equal speed and ease. His rich rewards flow from his unerring ability to see the needs and desires of those around him even before they are aware of them themselves.

His target – the Baudu family – are small-time shopkeepers and their struggle is the emotional centre of the drama.

Mouret and his coporate behemoth are symbolically interchangeable – both are irresistible through their limitless capacity to grant the desires of those who come into contact with them, but both must be humanized. Thus the play is a parable for a powerfully modern paradox: the dilemma faced by both individuals and of modern society as a whole, in the wake of globalization: how to respond to the seduction of consumerism and limitless availability while preserving a human dimension in work and life.

But in Denise Baudu, Mouret has unexpectedly met his match. Her own capacity for human insight is prodigious – though untrained, and untainted by greed. He finds in her the purified version of himself and so falls in love. Denise is seduced as much by her desire to humanise the operation of the company as by the irresistible Mouret himself. First she goes to work for her Uncle’s apparent enemy, then she moves into management, and ultimately she marries Mouret.

THE PARADISE: Mouret’s eponymous department store presents a symbol for the familiar dilemma of de-regulation and globalization.

This story focuses on the human interaction. In this wicked, seductive, greedy world, there seem to be no bad people – just many people who commit bad, foolish, ungenerous and manipulative acts. We understand and sympathise with them all – thus placing us in the crux of a moral dilemma – and dominating everything is the sense that actually none of these people, including Mouret, are in control of their destiny. Rather a system – implacable because it responds so perfectly to human desire – is gradually encroaching on the humanity of all present.

Mouret’s expansions are only possible because a faceless figure above him is planning to shatter one of the world’s great cities with a massive boulevard. A teeming mass of humanity must be rent asunder in the name of ‘progress’.

The original nineteenth century setting is ostensibly preserved in the script though re-imagined with a contemporary sensibility. The era is useful to us for the elegant absurdities it provides but moreover because the story is a fable of the birth of consumerism – born in the slipstream of the industrial revolution, to later flourish and run rampant in the twentieth century.

We created an imagined nineteenth century Paris that is in reality a mirror for 21st century Sydney. This facilitated the unique linguistic experiment that Justin Fleming undertakes. He developed a verbal style for the piece that offers a pastische of 19th century epigrammatic dialogue and romantic melodrama – combined with a 20th century absurdist/expressionistic dramaturgy, and refined with a sensibility that is international in outlook but Australian in its irreverent flavour.

The production responded to this style in order draw out the work’s central paradoxes. A world both seductive and threatening, facile and passionate, rich and empty, merry and dark.

Audaciously those paradoxes are not merely the subject of the drama but also its own nature as a piece or writing. It tempts you to be seduced by a rich and fantastical melodrama that ends in the traditional marriage, just as the department store tempts you to engorge yourself on emptiness. I developed a choreographed physical style, live music, and even deployed stage illusion – to seduce the audience then surprise them, drawing them into the fairy tale then returning them with a crash to a modern reality and consequence.

It is key to this approach that the staging engaged the audience’s imagination and invites them to draw the direct parallels between the world of the story and our own, the goal being to empower the audience with a newly honed vigilance against the seductions of luxury and gratification.