Emilie Charriot awakens the silences between Duras’ words

“How many crimes have been committed/Against lies and so-called laws of the heart/How many are there because of madness.” A mini speaker plays the song “Madness” from The Stranglers. At the foot of the stage of the main hall of the Théâtre de Vidy, the actor Nicolas Bouchaud tells us the sordid, true story mentioned in the song: a student who invites a young woman to his home, kills her and eats her. A news item.

The news item, this “black star that crosses our lives”, fascinates as much as it repels. Vile, it concerns us all. Who among us has never thought about committing a crime? It is this motif that Emilie Charriot, a keen reader of contemporary texts, explores in “The English Amante” by Marguerite Duras, on display at Vidy then at the Théâtre Saint-Gervais, before the Odéon in Paris.

At the end of the preamble, time for the lively and incisive text by Duras. This diptych piece is inspired by a real news event that occurred in France in the 1940s. A man kills his wife, dismembers her body and throws the pieces into freight cars. The author moves the plot: in “The English Amante”, Claire Lannes no longer kills her husband, but her cousin Marie-Thérèse Bousquet, who lives in the couple’s house. She confesses to the crime but does not explain her actions.

Role of language

In the role of the interrogator, Nicolas Bouchaud, while restrained, carries out a dissection of the couple formed by Claire Lannes (Dominique Reymond) and her husband, Pierre (Laurent Poitrenaux). It’s about probing the abyss of human relationships. To slip through the labyrinth of the psyche. To seek the reasons for crime in the interstices of madness.

Sitting in the audience, Pierre Lannes faces the interrogator. With loud words and broad gestures, Laurent Poitrenaux answers disturbing questions. Step by step a dull daily life unfolds, an overly clean bourgeois life, soaring passions, things left unsaid. Language plays a central role, carrying misunderstandings and slips of the tongue. Thus, under the pen of Claire Lannes, English mint (her favorite plant) becomes the clay lover.

In the second part of the play, the interrogator confronts Claire Lannes on the set almost naked. Dominique Reymond, extraordinary in his ambivalence, portrays an elusive woman, who slips away as soon as we think we grasp the beginning of an answer. We won’t know what’s going on in Claire Lannes’ mind. At most, her call to be listened to. Very subtly, Emilie Charriot manages to make the silences between the words speak.

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