<L'Homme du hasard> (The Man of chance) of Yasmina Reza does not abide by a traditional play structure which proceeds with short dialogues: it is composed of internal monologues which happen in the minds of the characters. The internal monologue shows ...
<L'Homme du hasard> (The Man of chance) of Yasmina Reza does not abide by a traditional play structure which proceeds with short dialogues: it is composed of internal monologues which happen in the minds of the characters. The internal monologue shows the stream of consciousness of the characters not in the traditional method but in an irrational one. Evidently our internal thinking is not coherent, it passes without transition from one subject to another. This characteristic is very different from the monologue of the classic theatre in which the character reveals his emotions, his thoughts or his decisions to take in a logic and rational method. The writing based on the internal monologue resembles the nouveau roman or the automatic writing of the Surrealists.
On the dimension of structure, this play is in mise en abyme, that is to say, inside of a play is circumscribed another play which has the same title and the same intrigue and the characters of the frame play appear also in the inner play. For example, a play whose title is “L'Homme du hasard” is circumscribed in L'Homme du hasard and these two plays seem to have the same structure and the same intrigue. By this structure of mise en abyme, the author of this play deliberates on the relations between the author and the work, the author and the reader, the author and the critic, etc. Therefore, it is concerned with the meta-theatre and composes the focal point of the play. Yasmina Reza who shows herself through her characters reveals her ideas about these relations through Parsky and Martha.
This play includes also the theme of luck. The Man (Parsky) and the Woman (Martha), that is to say, an author and his reader, meet by chance in the compartment of a train. In the manner of Surrealists who believed that chance is a meeting of internal desire and external necessity, the Woman sits face to face with the author in the compartment that they happen to share: she spent her life reading his works.
Apart from the internal monologue, the mise en abyme and luck, there is also the theme of the vanity of life that we can feel when noticing the time passing by with no return. Parsky, a character whose profession is an author, feels bitter all the time, which seems to be the same feeling with the writer of this play.
In short, this play dramatizes the thinking operative of the characters through the internal monologues, reveals the self-consciousness of the author by the structure of meta-theatre and, at the same time, erases the frontier between the theatre and the narration. This joins, too, the vogue of theatre-narration in the French theatre of the second half of the 20th century, in particular, in Beckett, Koltès and Lagarce.