In Rennes, the Théâtre national de Bretagne festival puts actors in the spotlight

Three times an actor, and the theater comes alive. Those presented at the Théâtre national de Bretagne (TNB) festival this year, in three short plays among a beautiful anthology of programming, are able to give new life to this old idea called theater, not in what it can produce something monumental or more solemn, but, on the opposite tangent, in what it can generate of imaginary and comical touperation, equipped with next to nothing.

A tent for Pierre Maillet at Patricia Allio, a small electric spinner for Charlotte Clamens at Valérie Mréjen, a fake mustache for Florence Janas at Guillaume Vincent. The accessory becomes an activator of play for actors made sovereign in propositions which nonetheless reflect a creation in crisis, increasingly forced to perform solo.

It is the paradox of modest forms to succeed, sometimes, in rendering a tenfold theater, in exposing its aesthetic nerve raw. Elasticity at work in How to get rid of your interior plasterby Valérie Mréjen, is, in this respect, exemplary. Featuring a major actress – Charlotte Clamens – who has crossed the worlds of Bozonnet, Françon and Sivadier, the play takes place at the table, in the negative of the theater (where work “at the table” often precedes work “at the table”). tray”), on either side of a white work surface at the other end of which Mréjen comes to join his actress, tapping notes on his computer as the other speaks to him.

The feverish strangeness of existence

To hear Charlotte, it seems that only bad things happen to her. In Madrid, she explodes a bottle of olive oil on a wooden floor; in Avignon, she loses her handbag while getting off the train… Seemingly harmless, these anecdotes, recounted with devastating nonchalance, reveal something of the feverish strangeness of existence. The whole set soon ends up responding to a principle of disaster: a dog named Pina enters the scene, the first disruptive agent in a strict system.

Then Charlotte unpacks a strange accessory, a turntable which will be used by the two women to pass glasses of water to each other without getting up for a few burlesque gags, and which will be transformed into a podium for a ridiculous choreography by the actress on the most grandiloquent Rihanna songs, Diamonds.

Once again, an exchange between director and actress is visible in Paradoxone of the most beautiful things we have ever seen in this festival, and yet only the model of a show destined to be born next fall in the same TNB. It is a window into a work in progress, but an exciting work, done, again, so little, and above all held together by the shared presence of Guillaume Vincent, in the background, and his actress Florence Janas, standing facing the audience .

His performance is probably genius. Just adorned with a mustache which is enough to make her embody the director, the actress becomes the belt of collected or remembered words; converses alone, changing her voice, while staying away from the show of force. Through it emerge “real or fantasized scenes”, Guillaume Vincent’s memories of the year when his mother died, a second-hand memory transmitted to the actress in a number that is both deliberately pointless (fake mustache, false accents) and upsetting.

A manifesto against rigid social categories

Pierre Maillet holds Live all alone without his director to support him on stage, developing linguistic and philosophical variations around the title verb such as: “The clothes don’t make the monk, but the dick does. » Created in 2007, rewritten to, in particular, integrate a lipsync passage (playback or lip synchronization) in Giorgia Meloni’s drag costume, Live sees the actor expound with unwavering enthusiasm poetic, erratic and free theories which compose a manifesto against rigid social categories. Naked in a tent which he transforms into a burrow or a cassock, the actor excels in this exercise of emancipation of the body and the senses.

Also included, among the other proposals of this festival, On the ice path by Bruno Geslin, who takes on the travel story of Werner Herzog walking from Munich to Paris in a much more lyrical setting. Or the beautiful and hieratic Leviathanby Lorraine de Sagazan, a particularly effective indictment against the crushing machine that the immediate appearance procedure represents in the courts. The programming continues until November 23 and will notably feature a young generation of actors: those leaving the TNB school directed by Pascal Rambert in the filmy Dreamers #2.

TNB Festival until November 23, in Rennes. Rens. : tnb.fr. On the ice path then turns to Malakoff, Pau, Albi and Douai; Livein Angers. The tour of How to get rid of your interior plaster is under construction.