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Masterplots: 2010-2018 Supplement

The Unexpected Man

Author: Yasmina Reza

Born: May 1, 1959; Paris, France

First published: L’homme du hasard, 1995; The Unexpected Man, 1998

First produced: L’homme du hasard, 1995, at the Théâtre Hébertot, Paris, France; The Unexpected Man, 1998, at the Barbican Pit, London, England

Type of plot: Drama

Time of work: Ambiguous

Locale: A train compartment

Principal Characters

Paul Parsky, the man, an aging novelist

Martha, the woman

The Story

A man and a woman, strangers, are sitting in the same compartment on a train traveling from Paris to Frankfurt. The bulk of the play follows their individual interior thoughts in monologue. The man, an aging novelist named Paul Parsky—identified in the character list and the script as simply “The Man—is bitter. His monologue is a litany of abuses and regrets. He suffers from constipation and insomnia; his daughter, Nathalie, is engaged to a much older man with a ”droning" voice; he complains that no one will satisfy his loneliness, and thinks some horrendously degrading things about his friend’s girlfriend, who is Japanese, and a black woman he once slept with.

Martha, identified throughout as “The Woman,” stares at a photograph in the train compartment. The photograph makes her think of her friend Serge, who has just died. She quickly realizes that the man seated before her in the train compartment is her favorite author. What a coincidence, she thinks; she has his latest book, The Unexpected Man, in her bag. She debates whether or not to introduce herself, then decides against it. Parsky thinks about the book he is currently writing, called The Captain of a Lost Ship. He vows to never write again once he has finished it. This new book, he tells himself, will embody “the man [he] still hope[s] to become.

Martha is thinking about Serge again. Serge did not like Parsky’s books—it was the only point of disagreement in their friendship. He said the books were repetitive, with a negative worldview. Martha, on the other hand, feels deeply connected to Parsky’s work. Addressing him in her mind, she tells him all of the things she loves about his writing. Her quandary—whether or not to engage him in conversation—takes on more weight. What if he does not live up to her vision of him?

Parsky is still absorbed in his grievances. He reflects on what he sees as his artistic failings. It seems that no one, not even a friend and fan named Elie, was sufficiently impressed by The Unexpected Man. Elie said the book was repetitive, and the language of the criticism infuriates Parsky.

Martha wonders what it would be like to have Parsky as a friend. She recalls a past friendship with a dentist named Georges. Martha, who is married with two children, always enjoyed her relationship with Georges because it was somewhat flirtatious. But after many years, Georges married one of his patients. He and his wife had a baby, and Martha became repulsed by Georges’s interest in the child.

Martha desperately wants to tell Parsky, “Mr. Parsky, I’m prepared to risk any kind of adventure with you.” If she says it and he laughs, she tells herself, he is the kind of person she hoped he would be. However, she is concerned that he may not laugh. Parsky, finally, has noticed Martha. He thinks it is strange that she is not reading anything. He returns to thinking about The Unexpected Man, wondering plaintively if a single person on Earth even understands it. Martha thinks about Serge again and marvels at the disposition of people who can fall asleep at night—Martha, like Parsky, cannot. Their inner monologues begin to touch on similar subjects, such as the Romantic composer Robert Schumann. Parsky, intrigued by Martha’s face, asks her if he might open the window. Having enjoyed this brief interaction, Parsky weaves an elaborate fantasy of Martha’s life in which her lover is a music conductor.

Martha takes The Unexpected Man out of her bag and begins to read it, hoping it will catch Parsky’s attention. It does. He frantically wonders how much of it she has read and whether or not she likes it. After a while, Parsky decides to speak first. He engages her in a conversation about the act of writing, claiming to have read the book in her hands. His criticisms of the author’s works as a whole give away his insecurities. Martha challenges the criticisms. She finishes her point by saying, “Mr. Parsky, I’m prepared to risk any kind of adventure with you,” and he laughs.

Critical Evaluation

The Unexpected Man was translated from the French by Christopher Hampton and had its English-language premiere in London in 1998. It played Off-Broadway in 2000. Reza was then best known for her hit 1994 debut, Art, which won the 1997 Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy and the 1998 Tony Award for best new play, among other awards. In it, a middle-class Parisian buys a modern painting—a canvas painted completely white—for an outrageous sum of money, to the horror of his friends; the three-character play explores the value of art, friendship, and honesty. Later, Reza wrote what is considered her most famous play, a comedy called God of Carnage (2006), in which two couples discuss a playground dust-up between their children. The civilized meeting devolves quickly. God of Carnage also, in 2009, won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy and the Tony Award for best new play.

The Unexpected Man does not have the satirical bent of these two plays, though it does contain humor. The chamber piece, as it sometimes called for its short length, was generally well received when it premiered. Linda Winer, in her review for the Los Angeles Times, praised the play, calling it an “exquisite brief encounter,” and added that it was more substantial than Art—which had, notably, been so successful as to spawn a backlash. Charles Isherwood, writing for Variety, was equally charmed, though he reserved most of his praise for actor Eileen Atkins. Other critics felt the strength of the actors—Atkins and Alan Bates—concealed the poverty of the script itself, giving nuance to a story that was really no story at all. Echoing the views of others, Kelly Kleiman wrote for the Chicago Reader that The Unexpected Man “is so slight that if not anchored by substantial performances it will simply float away.” Ben Brantley, the head critic for the New York Times, went further, describing Reza’s sensibility as “middlebrow” and criticizing the script as second-rate philosophizing.

The Unexpected Man is quite spare, running just slightly over an hour. In that time, the characters directly interact for no more than a few minutes. The play explores themes of loneliness and the difficulty of forming human connections. (As Martha says, “Desire always outstrips what actually happens.) In this void of aloneness, people often gravitate toward literature, incorporating their favorite books into the very essence of their being. People form extraordinarily meaningful (though, of course, ultimately one-sided) relationships with their favorite authors. It just so happens that in The Unexpected Man, Martha finds herself faced with her own favorite author—a man whom she has never met but who is no less a part of her soul. The question of whether she should say something to the man and risk his response, or remain quiet and preserve her illusions, is the central dilemma of Reza’s play. Martha devises several escalating tests for Parsky. After much deliberation, she decides to take the book out of her bag and read it to catch his attention. At the end of the play, after a brief exchange, she gives him the line that she hopes will reveal him as either a friend or a stranger.

In the play’s resolution, Parsky and Martha form a fledgling connection, thus ending where most stories begin. But, as Reza writes it, the stakes of this small gesture are high. The audience knows that both Martha and Parsky are lonely, but neither knows that the other feels the same way. This is dramatic irony, a term that refers to a situation in which the audience is given more information than the characters onstage, and waits anxiously for them to figure out what the audience already knows. The result is surprisingly effective. Isherwood wrote that The Unexpected Man “is, in its own more cerebral way, as much a nail-biter as the famous Hitchcock film about two similarly situated strangers,” referring to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train (1951), which has a similar set-up. To this effect, the play also uses theatricality, a device in which the audience sees one thing but understands it to be another thing. A famous example of theatricality can be found in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town (1938). In the third act, actors sit rigidly in chairs scattered across the stage; the audience understands, through context clues, that the actors are playing headstones, and that when they speak, they are giving voice to characters who are dead. The characters in The Unexpected Man speak out loud, but the audience understands—without being explicitly told—that these monologues take place internally.

One of the more divisive aspects of Reza’s script is her tendency to write in short, philosophical epigrams. (Neurotics are the cream of humanity," Martha thinks at one point.) The cadence of these lines could be attributed to the translation by the famous British playwright Christopher Hampton, but the heart of the material remains the same. This heightened manner of speaking contributes to Reza’s larger vision; The Unexpected Man, like God of Carnage, has a real, specific setting, yet in the production notes for both plays, Reza insists that nothing in the set look realistic. (Most productions of The Unexpected Man feature actors sitting in chairs on an empty stage.) She even goes so far as to suggest, in The Unexpected Man, that the story is unfolding somehow outside of time, in “air” and “space,” as she puts it. It is unclear why, when the characters’ names are revealed in the play, Reza chooses to identify them as simply “The Man” and “The Woman” in the character list and throughout the script, but that decision, like the others, reaches for a larger, more universal poetic reality, just outside the realm of the world most people know.

Citation Types

MLA 9th

"The Unexpected Man." Masterplots: 2010-2018 Supplement,Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MPSupp_0173.

APA 7th

The Unexpected Man. Masterplots: 2010-2018 Supplement,Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MPSupp_0173.

CMOS 17th