That Fabrice Luchini is a phenomenon is obvious. That he is above all an exceptional actor is the other certainty before which the audience of the Théâtre de l’Atelier, in Paris, bows, where the last show of the artist is performed (who will perform it again, from January 19 2025, at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, in Paris).
Read the interview with Fabrice Luchini (in 2021): Article reserved for our subscribers “I’m not good at happiness, I’m good at work”
Read later
Almost two hours of a surge of sensations, emotions and words where it is only about Victor Hugo. Hugo praised by Baudelaire and saluted by Péguy. Hugo, for whom the actor is careful not to build a mortuary marble statue (that’s not his style), but which he makes stand up, today, vibrant, sensual, human. More necessary to our lives than ever. If we were to remember only one flash of this ardent representation, it would be the imperative necessity of the wedding between poetry and humanity. A cliché? Yes, but who is stripped here: without poetry, humanity is poor in words, without humanity, poetry does not have much to say.
How does the actor achieve this feat? In the first pages of Satin shoe (1929), an Announcer appears who warns everyone: “Listen carefully, don’t cough and try to understand a little. It’s what you won’t understand that’s the most beautiful, it’s what’s longest that’s most interesting, and it’s what you don’t find amusing that’s the funniest. » Paul Claudel is not called on the set, but Fabrice Luchini could have mentioned him in the programmatic preamble. Not only because the public stops coughing the moment he begs them to do so, in one of his brazen addresses of which he has the secret. But also because it creates an oceanic feeling in the room. He calls it fraternity: “There are 600 of you present every evening, I have never experienced that”enthuses the actor.
An intangible communion
The fact is: an intangible communion is formed around the literature led by Hugo to stratospheric heights and which the actor knows how to stage with a consummate art of suspense, waiting and build-ups.
Less mutt than usual, sometimes even solemn, and almost painful when the Pastoral the Beethoven (“this deaf man who had a soul heard the infinite”), he crumples and smoothes his manuscript, puts on his glasses, takes them off, rubs his left sleeve with his right hand, stares at the audience with the childish but cunning eye of a patented seducer. His face is plastic. His voice wanders in confidences or invectives. He pretends to stammer, before saying the verses straight. He stands for a long time leaning against a wooden table, sits down on the chair and then on the armchair. Three or four trips in space, no more.
You have 48.47% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
