The flame of a candle, a cloud of smoke, the sweet melody of an oud, a stretched white sheet behind which emerges, like a Chinese shadow, the silhouette of a body which contorts itself into strange postures as it plays. of light… This is what the public discovers when entering the small Marie-Curie room, upstairs at the La Reine blanche theater, in Paris. The very young company Les Yeux larges, founded in 2024 by the actor Elie Boissière, presents its first creation, I am not Arabuntil December 21.
Then the story begins in a maternity ward, where Elie and Dounia await the arrival of their first child, surrounded by their respective families… and by a parade of traditional dishes brought by everyone. But the baby does not want to come out of his mother’s womb, and his father realizes that an essential person is missing: his maternal grandmother, Mahdjouba, who changed her first name to be called Magda – she believes, in indeed, that she is not Arab but French, because, she says, “Algeria was French at the time”.
This is the starting point, real or fictional, it doesn’t matter, of a tale full of fantasy, poetry and humor which borrows both from the classic life story and from the epic, the Homeric odyssey. From the scraps of memories that this grandmother reluctantly gives him, because she thinks it is better “leave the dead alone” and not to look back on his past, his grandson Elie will invent an incredible journey to a fantasized and phantasmagorical Oran, that of the 1930s-1940s, where Mahdjouba was born (in 1942) and spent the beginning of her existence, until around the age of 8.
Eccentric characters
A bit like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the narrator-actor encounters a whole gallery of eccentric and zany characters on his path: an Italian concerned about the state of health of his peers, a barking ice cream seller, a Rasta goat, a salesman thundering sardines… But he also meets very real people, from his family history (notably his grandmother, then a little girl, with her own mother, Fatma Akrour) or from History with a big “H”, like the politician Messali Hadj (1898-1974), founder of the Algerian People’s Party, figure of independence, or the mayor of Oran (from 1934 to 1941), Abbé Lambert (1900 -1979).
Elie Boissière manages to bring each of these characters to life, often with great accuracy and emotion, even if, from time to time, he pushes the line a little in his interpretation, at the risk of falling into caricature. Providing moments of pause in this breathtaking story, it allows the audience to really listen and fully enjoy the music played live, on stage, by the professional oud player, Ahmed Amine Ben Feguira, always present at his side .
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