At the Comédie de Paris, comedian Constance replays her psychiatric journey

“It’s the show of my life”Constance calmly slips in after an hour of interview. The formula may seem corny. However, it is neither excessive nor hackneyed as the new one-woman show by this comedian is an unforgettable stripping bare for the spectator and the most perilous exercise to which the actress has subjected herself. On the poster forInconstancythe title of her show, we see her wearing a fuchsia pink tulle dress, hair blowing in the wind, a dazzling smile, and running… in a hospital corridor.

Constance has emerged from the tunnel of depression, has regained a taste for life and the stage, which she is returning to after almost three years of absence. It is this dark period, this psychological confinement that she has chosen to tell. An exercise that is oh so difficult, which she takes up with flying colors in a story that is more biting than tearful, not egocentric but humanistic, and terribly movingly funny. Humor, they say, is the politeness of despair. This sentence takes on its full meaning with Inconstancy, testimony of a fight and a rebirth.

Since 2008, Constance, with her angelic face, blonde hair and voice that is both childish and mischievous, has been performing one-woman shows (I’m a princess, dammit!, Mothers hide to die, Sentimental orgy, Sheaves of love, Potpourri), in Paris and on tour, mixing black humor, irreverence and insolence, playing on metamorphosis, costume included, to depict the neuroses of her contemporaries.

But, at the beginning of 2022, as the comedian began an eighty-date tour, she collapsed on stage. “I just collapsed. The little horse didn’t hold. I thought I was done for, I had lost all self-esteem. It’s horribly banal.”she sums up, seated at the bar of the Hôtel Amour in Paris. At first, the audience believes that this episode is part of the show before understanding that she will not get up again. Curtain.

“I didn’t want to admit that I was fallible”

There had been warning signs: a first burnout that was poorly treated, a bad choice of producer and an exhausting attempt at self-production, a column, “Parlons balcon, parlons nichons”, on France Inter, where she officiated for five years in Charline Vanhoenacker’s shows, which had earned her three million views on YouTube, but a torrent of insults on social networks. Her “wrong”: regretting that a woman breastfeeding in a public space could still cause a scandal, she had the audacity, to illustrate her point, to end her humorous post topless.

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