The Suicidegiven at the Comédie-Française until February 2025, is a theatrical adventure difficult to summarize, it is a jubilant and hilarious experience to live. In the dark, a man plays the piano, a loupiote above his head.
Still in the dark, a man wakes his wife with an urgent request: “Macha, Macha, is there any sausage left?” Macha is not happy to be woken from her sleep, she lets her indelicate husband know. Sémione thinks he can guess the reason for Macha’s discontent: he has been unemployed for a year.
fiat luxury, the light returns. In a decrepit community apartment, the couple continues to tear each other apart. The misunderstanding arrives: Macha thinks that her husband can no longer stand his life and that he is considering ending his life. Then the big misunderstanding, everything comes to a head, the rumor of his future suicide spreads.
Sémione sees his hour of glory coming: the depressed unemployed person is encouraged everywhere and by everyone to claim his suicide in the name of this or that cause. And the absurd reaches its climax.
The story takes place in the late 1920s in the former Soviet Union. The great Stalinist purges have not begun. The intermediary bodies still hope to bring the State to reason. To, in the process, secure their place and improve their conditions. To do this, Sémione, played by a convincing Jérémy Lopez, must stop being selfish and follow through with his action. And to claim it in the name of intellectuals, butchers, writers… Because if intellectuals are reduced to silence, “you can’t muzzle a dead person if he wants to speak.”
Nicolaï Erdman’s play, written in 1928 and never produced during his lifetime, is an x-ray of Soviet society. His absurd and grating humor displeases Moscow. He was arrested in 1933 and sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia after writing a satirical poem about Stalin.
The Suicide, Nicolaï Erdman’s latest play enters the repertoire of the Comédie Française for the first time. The dialogues are fine-tuned, the lines come out all the time. The characters evolve in isolation, obsessed with their own interests, crushed by an authoritarian system, like this man incapable of knowing where to place commas in a sentence.
But what does the main person think of his suicide? “I hoped suicide would make my life better.” The most pressing of Sémione’s new friends is a vindictive and resistant intellectual through an intermediary, played by an impressively present Serge Bagdassarian.
The Suicide is an addition of several theaters. We go from vaudeville to zany, from scathing comedy to harsh criticism, from the absurd to song… Stéphane Varupenne creates a work that is funny, intelligent, deep in the existential questions it never fails to raise, and therefore resolutely contemporary.
Auteur : Nicolaï Erdman
Staging: Stéphane Varupenne
French text, adaptation and dramaturgy: Clément Camar-Mercier
Scenography: Eric Ruf
Distribution : Sylvia Bergé, Florence Viala, Christian Gonon, Julie Sicard, Serge Bagdassarian, Adeline d’Hermy, Jérémy Lopez, Clément Hervieu-Léger, Anna Cervinka, Yoann Gasiorowski, Clément Bresson, Adrien Simion, Léa Lopez and Melchior Burin des Roziers
Musicians: Vincent Leterme, Véronique Fèvre, Hervé Legeay and Martin Leterme
Surtitles: French sign language, adapted French, French, English
Duration : 2h20 without intermission
Dates : until February 2, 2025
Lieu : Comédie-Française, Salle Richelieu, place Colette, 75001 Paris
