Electric, convulsive and conflicting from start to finish: Marina Hands’ staging of Luigi Pirandello’s text Six characters in search of an author is the exact reflection of what the resident of the Comédie-Française usually reflects when we see her perform (in this show, she does not go on stage).
If only for this absolute concordance between the fiery temperament of an actress and the equally incendiary tone of her representation, you have to go to the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, in Paris. We get the measure of what necessity means when it truly fuels a creation. Marina Hands has the absolute in her sights. It happens that his show burns its wings in the fire of its intensities. But we can’t blame him for walling off in lukewarmness.
Warm and harsh atmosphere, therefore, at the Vieux-Colombier, especially since the bi-frontal stage places the actors almost within touching distance of the spectator. Close-ups of their faces, their pouts and the sweat beading, all these details which make them bodies in presence and not abstractions. The representation settles quite quickly on the crests of excess (screams, tears, anger), at the risk of remaining stuck there and no longer being able to come down. The actors, all excellent, hold this note at altitude. A tour de force. But, on the audience side, this high level of tension can lead to a self-protective reflex, a sort of desire to stay away from the emotional overload and energy expenditure that overwhelms the stage.
Corrosive potential
The director enters the labyrinth deployed by Pirandello while concealing none of its corrosive potential. It is still a question, in this fable written in 1921, of a paid sexual relationship between a father-in-law and his daughter-in-law, of the guilty silence of the mother, of the suicide of a child. Where other stagings of the text would (rightly) focus on the author’s metatheatrical intention (notably his reflexive crossover between fiction and reality), Marina Hands dissects the human. Even if it means sacrificing the metaphysical scope of the piece (which mixes spectral and tangible), the show brings to light with real brutality the monstrous disintegration of a family as well as the illusion of a theater which believes itself capable of competing with the real.
Translated by Fabrice Melquiot, Six characters in search of an author (whose programmatic title is one of the most beautiful in the repertoire) tells of the confrontation between a troupe of actors at work and characters appearing from nothing. We gradually understand that these specters in need of incarnation form a devastated family. Sitting in the stands, they interrupt a pseudo-rehearsal during which an exhausted director (Guillaume Gallienne) tries to direct two recalcitrant performers (Claire de La Rüe du Can and Nicolas Chupin) with the help of his stage manager (Coraly Zahonero). .
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