Camille Cottin in the theater as a Nazi great-granddaughter undergoing gender transition

Two legs sheathed in flashy orange leggings move on the left side of the stage. The rest of the body is hidden by a magnificent and immense purple and pleated curtain which invades the stage. The amplified voice of Camille Cottin goes for an hour and a quarter in a sulphurous monologue telling us the desire of this German woman who wants to become a man thanks to the transplantation of a Jewish penis. She goes to the doctor Seligman, who prepares her for this operation. Thighs open, she confides, she chats, she gets angry, she despairs. With one question: how to settle scores with the Nazis and this past?

This character is played by Camille Cottin from Ten percent or who shared the blockbuster poster Stillwater with Matt Damon in 2021. A movie star, but in this always mysterious Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, she is the more punk Camille Cottin and closer to Assholehis series then his feature film from the 2010s, which covers the scene.

At the Théatre des Bouffes du Nord until January 25 and then on tour throughout France.

Adapted from the novel Jewish Cock by Katharina Volckmer, a young German author living in London, the monologue takes us into the mind of this woman who has two embarrassing heritages. Her body is not her type. She is a man in a woman’s body. And she is German. A young German woman and her nation’s Nazi past that haunts her. Until Adolph Hitler invaded his dreams, even erotic ones. And to welcome his confessions, his gynecologist, who is a little bald, will do better than his psychoanalyst, who is a little too smiling.

It begins like this on the Bouffes du Nord stage: “I know this might not be the best time to bring this up, Dr. Seligman, but I just remembered that one night I dreamed that I was Hitler. I’m horribly embarrassed to talk about it even now, but I was him for real, overlooking a crowd of fanatical supporters, giving a speech from a balcony. Dressed in the famous uniform with the funny baggy pants, I felt the little mustache above my upper lip, and my right hand made great windmills in the air while my voice put everyone in a trance.” The tone is set.

Katharina Volckmer explained in an interview on the site Waiting for Nadeau this desire to get rid of these identities, to change bodies for its heroine: “Basically, it’s her way of wanting to stop being German, a desire shared by many of her compatriots. It’s a complicated identity, we’re always a little embarrassed about it, abroad we’re embarrassed when we meet, preferring to maintain the illusion that we’re no longer very German.”

In the confessions of the character who does not have a name (we only know her ex, a certain K. bearing Kafka’s initial), she passes over the water, from the snow falling on the other next to the window of the gynecologist’s office with the memory of his mother’s horrible stomach stitched with an ugly scar from the cesarean section. She protests against the ugliness of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe for rambling about cats that don’t bark.

Sometimes she ventures into tender mockery of the rich, she who was fired from her job for wanting to staple a colleague’s ear right in the office: “I think that’s why rich people always have this special look, like they’re being put on a custom-made strap-on while someone irons their clean sheets in the living room. next to.”

At the end of the endings, she comes to her original trauma, the story of her great-grandfather, head of the last station before Aushwitz during the Holocaust. Everything was in order thanks to him in the running of the trains from hell. Black humor and poetry flirt in this desperate confessional.

Camille Cottin thus goes from melancholy to gentle anger, from fear of solitude to the expression of hope for a better life: “Is Don’t be afraid of what we’re about to accomplish, though, Dr. Seligman. I’m not afraid of dying or whatever. I know I can trust you, and that death is silent.” She gives body to this woman, she dances, she twirls, she collapses, mimes or hides. This acting performance brings this woman to life, simply and wonderfully an incarnation.

Directed with Camille Cottin, Jonathan Capdevielle. He is actor, puppeteer, ventriloquist, dancer, singer. As a ventriloquist, we can guess the work of Camille Cottin’s voice. She speaks to us before we can distinguish her. The sound circulates, the timbres mutate. From the puppeteer we say to ourselves that he locks her in this large purple fabric, the walk on this pile of rags which has become a sleeping body which breathes beautifully, the extension offered to the doctor to finally, as the text demands, free her to the sound of the hit by Manchester group Oasis. Wonder wall resonates and Camille Cottin leaves with her character behind the purple curtain.

The meeting, adaptation of Jewish Cock by Katharina Volckmer by Camille Cottin and Jonathan Capdevielle, directed by Jonathan Capdevielle, at Bouffes du Nord (75 010) until January 25.