Little spicy scenes
I discovered Jean-Claude a few years ago as a poet, but over the past few months, he has shown me another facet of his writing talent: theater. This collection is the second of this literary genre that he made me read, it includes eighteen sketches most often evoking relationships between men, especially relationships between men and women. Most often, almost always, these sketches feature two characters: one and the other, he and she, she and him, the mother and the son. Anonymous characters, ordinary people, who experience adventures that anyone could experience. Adventures that are often comical, funny, incongruous, sometimes dramatic, always surprising in their outcome.
In order not to detract from the texts, I would not like to mention all the sketches laid out in this collection, I will only cite a few examples to tempt readers a little more and highlight the author’s finesse of mind. at the same time as the touch of mischief that he distills in his dialogues. In the first of this collection, he features a reader who is desperately looking for a book that he absolutely wants to read and a young, zealous bookseller who is desperate to find him this book which seems to exist only in the mind. of two young lovebirds who lose the most basic notions of prudence. In this other sketch, in a public toilet, a man hears another angry man ruminating about the murder he is going to commit, he goes to the police so that they can avoid this tragedy but they are looking for him for another murder he would have committed, ultimately the other commits his murder too. To conclude my little series of examples, I will mention this very short sketch in which a husband sees the inhabitants of the neighborhood dropping like flies, he wants to help them but his wife minimizes the problem and advises him to take, like her, a sleeping pill, they will never wake up.
In these skits, Jean-Claude paints a portrait of current society through its faults and perversions: its beliefs, its desires, its jealousies, its malfeasance, its greed, its lust and other faults which delight fans theater called boulevard. He invents the most improbable stratagems to stage all these burlesque, fantastic, mischievous and sometimes even a bit romantic malpractices to throw his characters into the traps he has designed to denounce their faults. All these sometimes dramatic failings which fill the news section in our newspapers and now in so-called social networks even if they are little.
Jean-Claude’s poetic talents served these dialogues well, which despite their brevity, are always very finely written, very effective, very funny despite their darkness and often mischievously shot. I would love to see them said on stage and even why not performed.
