Dark night in the theater. Heels click on a wooden floor when, gently, a light sneaks into the space and chases away the darkness. With a calm step, in pumps and a fitted trench coat, a woman walks towards us. The actress Saadia Bentaïeb inaugurates an edifying comedy of manners whose other protagonists are Agnès Berthon, Yannick Choirat, Philippe Frécon, Ruth Olaizola, Marie Piemontese, Anne Rotger, David Sighicelli, Maxime Tshibangu. It’s been years since we last saw this troupe of top-flight actors gathered on stage. No doubt: Joël Pommerat is back. And with what mastery!
Eleven years after creating at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe The Reunification of the Two Koreas, the author-director brings back to life at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, in Paris, this thorny kaleidoscope of loving and friendly relationships which, in 2013, could have been received with a certain perplexity. Around twenty slices of life set together with a whisper, some more developed than others, not all equal in intensity, but which, in their fascinating end to end, unfold a chain of relationships where banality and monstrosity dance an infernal tango, arousing bursts of laughter or shivers of worry.
A woman opposes the marriage of her sister whose future husband would have one day kissed her; a man returns, years later, to apologize to his ex-partner (“I forgot to say goodbye to you”) ; a teacher confesses a (guilty?) passion for a little boy in his care; a couple invents children they don’t have; two friends come to blows; a woman leaves her partner because loving him is not enough; a second loses her memory and rediscovers every day the man she is married to, etc.
Contradictory vibrations
These variations form a dissonant melody where the heterogeneity of the situations exposed, far from being a pitfall, signals the contradictory and even incoherent vibrations which shape our interiorities. Pommerat does not restore the feeling to an illusory and soothing beauty. It reveals the discontinuity, the paradoxes, the sometimes haggard character, the often derisory foundation. He doesn’t write about feeling, he dramatizes it. An enterprise that arouses the cock and donkey of heroic or pathetic lives, of funny or dramatic words, of exemplary or dubious attitudes.
Read the review (2013) | Article reserved for our subscribers Has Pommerat’s carriage become a pumpkin?
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Salutary effect of the passage of time: its text reactivates in 2024 with a searing relevance. It is impossible to remove it from what, in a decade, has disrupted the conception of links (whatever they may be) by introducing, into consciousness, the notions of alienation, consent, patriarchy or emancipation. Pommerat’s words are the same as before. Not us. This is why listening to them has the effect of a slap in the face, intensified by their deployment in a stage system redesigned from the ground up. For the best.
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