HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAMES

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Quasimodo is keeping vigil over the lifeless body of his Gypsy love Esmeralda . With a quiet focused voice and humanly crumpled features, this hunchback is no movie caricature and becomes less so as we learn more of his life, rejected at birth as an abomination, raised lovingly by the cathedral’s archdeacon but rejected by all others. He struggles to understand how the Catholic God can love him. He now surveys the world from his lofty peak in the Notre Dame towers with only the bells and gargoyles for company. His description of the bells as family members is comic yet heart-rending, while his often poetic descriptions of life in the cathedral and the city help to place him within our own lives. We realise, for example, that his encounter with the gypsy woman is no coincidence but part of the ebb and flow of city life, that Paris’s beauty itself is skin-deep for, when night falls, evil emerges from the daily hustle and bustle.