What Toothless Pianos Tell Us
Why is the piano in Prayer for the French Republic quiet?
The photographer that loves dead pianos, Roman Robroek, knows why.
The vast majority of the beautiful places that Roman Robroek photographs don’t have any instruments left behind - and those photos may be the most beautiful -
but they don’t ‘live’ like the ones with an old piano with its teeth knocked out. Which is why Robroek says,
abandoned pianos are my most favourite objects to photograph.As soon as I know there is a neglected piano in the building, I will go there straight away to enjoy the scene. I can easily sit on the dusty floor for quite a long time imagining the beautiful music the piano once produced.
That’s the backstory that all of us designers that do put a lot of stuff on stage are going for.
So, memories of a kid practicing scales and grandma whipping out her favorite nocturne? Is that why the piano gets so much time and space in Prayer for the French Republic? All of the piano playing happened before WWII, so before this play. A silent piano onstage introduces beautiful ghost sounds? of a time that was beautiful and is now gone?
The rest don’t look like palaces to me - but they do imply some wealth. Maybe not aristocracy wealth, but wallpaper and piano wealth.
This one, though, looks like middle class furniture wealth - when people bought furniture with the intention that the kids and grandkids would inherit it - so each piece is from a different decade, and the piano is from the previous century. Wealth accumulated because this family stayed in this apartment for a century.
That piano inside an elegant room like the pink palace above, makes this a play about the most often exported version of France. Like, all that cliché French culture and beauty that this family embodies by living their stereotypical Parisian life complete with bare chested guitar strumming, wine drinking and croissants. They are participants in and the creators of that culture and beauty. Palaces are semi-public spaces, so this piano is like the Salomon gift to France. Oddly, that pink room is still pretty despite the dust and sad desertion.
This photo, though, could be the home of the family in A Prayer for the French Republic. If the play is set in this photo - it is a domestic drama. Family photos on the wall and several generations of the same family in the same apartment. This room, empty with a quiet piano (and a quiet tv), implies a beautiful, cozy, middle class life that at some point failed, because there is no one here to inherit that piano.
I think the set for the Broadway production achieved a poignant mix of both of those effects - the piano (+ the windows) looks like fancy France; and the piano (+ with a family photo) looks like rooted domestic life. In the end they leave the piano business and the family splits up. So, if contributions to French culture or the commitment to family are what that piano symbolizes, we should leave it dusty and quiet like in the above photos.
It’s called Prayer for the French Republic, though. Not prayer for the French family, not prayer for the French way of life. These people, and the small and large communities they are a part of, are invested in the principles that the French Republic is built on: liberté, égalité, fraternité.
The ending of the play show us this family re-investing in those principles. Just like WWII, half of the family stays in France in 2016. A young person wearing their religion on their head compels society to define and enforce the fourth French principle: laïcité - how and why does secularism = religious freedom.
I propose to you a third piano!
It’s a theater! That looks a little bit like a church. And it is in a public hospital that attended to everyone. So, a public theater. This one closed with WWII. But! this play will be staged in a theater that has not closed! Anyone in a theater watching Prayer for the French Republic is participating in a discussion about our principles in action. You and that theater are still trying to build a beautiful society by wrestling with the hard ideas. At least for now, keep that piano playing!
I am going to go build a tiny piano to sit next to my tiny French windows in the model, and try to get this show right.