Barbican Theatre Review: ‘LACRIMA’ is Ambitious but Hollow

Arianna Muñoz
Oct 1
3 min read

★★★ | If there is any industry that is inundated with tortured, self-destructive, fatally passionate individuals, it is fashion. The path to legendary status is riddled with drugs, abuse, self-harm, chronic overwork, backstabbing, and, in the most extreme cases, death.

It is unsurprising, then, that French-Vietnamese writer/director Caroline Guiela Nguyen opens her latest production, LACRIMA, with a suicide. Marion, head seamstress of the haute couture house of Beliana, for reasons we do not yet know, has been driven to such depths of despair as she crafts a wedding dress for an English princess, that she can see only one way out, one way to atone for her inability to create perfection.

So starts a sprawling, nearly three-hour production (with no interval) that spans the globe, following the construction of a royal wedding dress that must be a gown for the ages, whatever the cost may be. And so we go to Paris, the home of Beliana’s atelier, where Marion is overworked by an obnoxious, image-obsessed creative director; to the embroidery masters of Mumbai, straining their eyes to the point of blindness as they hand-sew priceless fabrics for western fashion houses; to the ageing lace-makers of Alençon, whose matriarchal world is at risk of dying out. In each of these three storylines, we see the physical, mental, and familial toll that constructing such a marvel takes; in each storyline, we are left haunted by the human cost of perfection, a wedding dress made not of lace, jewels, or silk, but of tears, blindness, broken families, fractured marriages, and ruptured lives.

The Cast of LACRIMA. Photo credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez — The Cast of *LACRIMA*. Photo credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez

That the Barbican programmed the production to open at the end of London Fashion Week is a provocative decision that cannot be unintentional. However, if LACRIMA was intended to serve as a dissection of the haute couture world, an intense exploration of both its beauty and brutality, ultimately it falls short, a production that relies so heavily on melodrama and immense scale that it loses the very humanity it seeks to celebrate.

First, though, to focus on the positive. LACRIMA features an impressive set by Alice Duchange - white walls, white curtains, bare tables - that, under Mathilde Chamoux and Jérémie Papin’s stark lighting design, feels as cold and clinical as a hospital operating room. The world of fashion may be bright and colourful, but we discover it is an illusion created by master craftsmen with the precision of a surgeon. Commendations must also go to the cast, who do their best against an overwrought, underdeveloped script, adding subtle nuance and pathos where they can.

Indeed, it is the script that is the key weakness of LACRIMA. Nguyen did extensive research on the world of haute couture and the master craftspeople who make the industry run, with in-depth knowledge that is undeniably evident throughout. But for a production that aims to dissect the human cost of haute couture, LACRIMA ultimately only skims the surface, failing to add anything new to the conversation.

Fascinating storylines that could be magnificent stand-alone dramas are rushed through. I think especially of a cuttingly relevant monologue by the manager of the Mumbai embroidery workshop, calling out the hypocrisies of the western fashion industry as they hold the workshop to stringent ethical standards that they themselves do not honour, or a subplot of Marion being abused by her husband (and employee), another storyline that could have proven an insightful perspective on how an industry largely held aloft by female clients and craftspeople is nevertheless rife with male abuse and exploitation. These are fascinating, complex stories that could take up a three-hour runtime all to themselves, and yet what LACRIMA leaves us with is a sense that, despite the long runtime and visual excesses, we have only barely scratched the surface.

At a time when fashion has become a flashpoint for conversations about quality, ethics, and the human cost of vanity — see the endless debates about Shein/fast-fashion, or on the other end of the spectrum, the recent scandal of worker exploitation at the uber-expensive Loro Piana — LACRIMA seemed well-poised to make an impactful statement on the industry. LACRIMA highlights the overlooked craftspeople and artisans behind the titans of fashion, the working men and women who bring the visions of creative directors to life. But why do these artists choose to sacrifice their lives in the service of this vision? Why do they destroy themselves, knowing that at the end of the day, their work will go uncredited, that the fame and glory will belong only to the creative director? By the end of LACRIMA, we still do not know.