In La Bâtie, Wajdi Mouawad pulverizes identity

What if we had gone astray? If the question of identity, which has so insistently crossed this 48^e edition of The Builtwas ultimately just a decoy? If self-affirmation through belonging to a community ultimately served as a straitjacket? Territorial, generational, cultural or gender-based, we have seen the claim waver so many times over the course of these eighteen days of scenic abundance! And now, at the end, six hours of spectacle in Annemasse end up definitively shattering the illusion: the “Square root of the verb to be” cannot be calculated. In case we hadn’t figured it out yet, we are infinitely multiple. And it can be proven.

Because Wajdi Mouawad does indeed rely on physics – and quantum mechanics – to deploy his galvanizing theory of probability. For him, chance is conjugated as it should be in the conditional, but to better lead to the indicative. That space-time forms folds will never contradict the reality of a lived experience. “To get from point A to point B, electrons take all possible paths,” the artist only tries to demonstrate, starting from his own biography. A story that begins in 1968 in Lebanon, winds through France and then Quebec, before settling in Paris. And a career as an author, director, actor, painter and theatre director that has earned the public “Incendies,” “Seuls” and “Tous des oiseaux,” among other works.

Five lives in one

But rather see his formula shine. His protagonist Talyani Waqar Malik was born like him in Lebanon. When the country plunged into civil war in 1975, his father rushed him to Europe, on a roll of the dice between Rome and Paris. “Square root of the verb to be” catches the boy some forty years later, when the random nature of his trajectory haunts him to the point of obsession. Could he not have become an odious neurosurgeon in Italy? A charitable taxi driver in Île-de-France like a gay plastic surgeon in Montreal? Or a man sentenced to death in Texas? A simple jeans salesman in Beirut? Wajdi Mouawad’s privilege consists in winding and unwinding the entire skein across the same board.

On that of Red Castlethis Friday and Saturday, there were fifteen actors to carry the five parallel scenarios: some cumulated several roles, like the astonishing Jérémie Galiana and Richard Thériault at both ends of the age pyramid; others played one and the same character throughout – that of Brother Nabil for Raphael Weinstock. As for Talyani and his different avatars, the fantastic Jérôme Kircher shared him with none other than Wajdi Mouawad. Although virtual, the figures of the prisoner and the old man on their death row will never be forgotten.

If a good first half of the fable is placed under the sign of the violent explosion that devastated the port of Beirut in 2020, its continuation responds to the opposite movement, that of a progressive fusion. The debris begins by echoing the existential fragmentation of being. But the ramifications gradually become porous, and, under the combined effects of love and humor, the different Talyani end up amalgamating on stage. Could it be that the standing ovation reserved for this choral conclusion of La Bâtie, last weekend, came to salute the proof that an identity can be both plural and reconciled?

Katia Berger has been a journalist in the cultural section since 2012. She covers current events in the performing arts, particularly through theatre and dance reviews, but also sometimes covers photography, visual arts and literature.More info

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