Minyana is France's most famous contemporary playwright, a maverick cross between Beckett and Pinter, at least two of his plays are on the Baccalaureat curriculum in French schools, yet most of us have never heard of him. Theatrically innovative and breaking conventions of dramatic form, Habitats is very much theatre as experienced rather than detached observation, it is funny, entertaining, often oblique and provocative. 
      Startlingly perky usherettes in 1950's prom skirts, tight tops and pedal pushers meet and greet you and show you to the uncomfortable but stylish seating in the cool, white space of the Gate Theatre. From the outset, Habitats establishes its predominant themes of pretence, facades and self delusion. To show just how things are not quite what they seem, the rather obvious device is used of placing mime artists in frozen positions amongst the audience – this is after all a French play – but wait a minute, double deception, my neighbour is a dummy, albeit a very convincing one. Our usherettes start striking attitudes and arabesques amongst the audience and thus starts the Prelude to a trilogy of vignettes, punctuated by intervals where we are thankfully encouraged to get up and move about. The Prelude consists of a sequence of 50 such arabesques describing a series of bemusing, kitsch idylls which by number 40 were becoming less than idyllic; Steve Waters has done a wonderful job with his translation, one wonders what the French equivalent of Walton on the Naze or Hutton-le-Hole are. 
      The first vignette, Habitats One, presents us with Mr dull, brown, middle-ranking executive, who is so consumed by his role as an executive in charge of packaging systems for his firm, with non-stop corporate-speak that he has lost all sense of his own identity, he is so dull and brown he has almost metamorphosed into one of his boxes. He was, however, the most sympathetic character of the whole play and the most humorous, but the strain of keeping up the facade begins to show and Richard Hansall has perfected some beautiful and subtle physical details: the fixed smile that gradually fades from his face, the slapping of the thigh in constructed humour and his deep unease when an approximation of his image is slide projected onto a wall; the inanity of his job has taken away all meaning from his life. But the self delusion is complete when we learn that one of the items he is packaging is turbines, missile warhead turbines, he informs us confidentially. 
      Habitats Two opens with a forty something, narcissistic actress with intellectual aspirations spouting forth bon mots from Schopenhauer to a younger and an older man who are both in thrall to her. The script wonderfully captures the manipulative personality that spins a canopy of artifice hovering over her victims, she uses men to feed her vanity and they are discarded when her appetite is sated. By making her living playing other people she too has fused the boundary between where her art and her personality conjoin. She tries to excuse herself by resorting to that clichéd excuse of dysfunctional family, but she has gained no insights as a result. This is a jewel of characterisation. 
      The most robustly formed and sinister character of the play appears in Habitats Three. Multiple murderer, James Inwood's life is a complete lie which he is unable to keep up with and, spiralling out of control, he takes life in order to make sense of his own. Minyana's script has brilliantly captured the eerily calm, cold, calculating machinations of a deluded mind and it uncomfortable viewing, one's sense of unease is compounded by the fact that he has been a member of the audience all evening. 
      Habitats was first played at the National Theatre in the summer of 2002 as part of The Lytelton Transformation project of thirteen world premieres under the same excellent direction of Fiona Laird; it is perfectly suited to the intimate space of the Gate Theatre and it is hoped that more of Minyana's works will be shown on this side of the Channel.
Louise Page