“The English lover”, when Marguerite Duras searches for the motive of the crime in the theater – rts.ch

The scene is delimited by a large white square. On the room side, it is accessed by a flight of steps of the same tone. Above, quadrilateral lighting, two 1950s chairs and that’s it. Signed by Yves Godin, the scenography evokes a dance stage and de facto, it is indeed a sort of ball that we are going to witness in this “Amante Anglaise”. Since her first success, “King Kong Théorie”, director Emilie Charriot has always favored theater reduced to these essentials: a text, characters, light, nothing more.

Who says ball says dances. Those of “The English Amante” are couple dances, perhaps a tango, because for each step forward always follows steps backward. We think we are progressing, but we move backwards. We think we are touching the truth, but it eludes us.

Inspired by a news item

In 1949, there was much talk in the French newspapers of “the ogress of Savigny-sur-Orge”, alias “The quiet skinner” Amélie Rabilloud. Lady, it’s not every day that a seemingly uneventful housewife murders her husband, then cuts him into pieces. A great reader of news items and above all passionate about the mechanisms of human drama, Marguerite Duras was inspired by this affair for a first theater text, “Les viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise” in 1960, followed by a second text intended for the stage in 1967, “The English Amante”.

Marguerite Duras is facetious. Its title is a red herring. No British lover in this largely reinvented crime. In the culprit’s garden grows… English mint. To the husband and wife duo, the author adds a third person: a deaf and mute cousin, staying to do the cleaning and cooking. She will be the murder victim. And his dismembered body will be thrown, piece by piece, onto freight trains passing nearby under a viaduct. As for the motive, it also changes under the Durassian pen: Amélie Rabilloud was beaten and deprived of everything by her executioner husband. The literary murderer, renamed Claire Lannes, has no apparent motive, other than a certain madness. The murder is complete, Claire arrested, “The English Lover” can begin.

The double of Marguerite Duras

First here is Nicolas Bouchaud. Lively and cunning, the actor embodies a curious character. Neither investigating judge nor lawyer, not even police officer or psychiatrist. He is Duras’ double. He/she is simply trying to know, to answer his/her two questions: why and where is the head that was never found? Before launching into his winding interrogation, Nicolas Bouchaud talks to us about the news item, he shares with us the sound of “La Madness”, a song by the punk group The Stranglers linked to a more recent news item which had marked him. : the story of a Japanese cannibal student. A possible Durassian character. Another conundrum, to be sure.

Then here is Claire’s husband. Alive and well. More than twenty years of life together with his wife whom he says he loves while seeming not to know her. The actor Laurent Poitrenaux, his verb at first restrained, as if stuck in bourgeois conventions, sits, a little lost, in the middle of the audience. He balks at certain questions from Nicolas/Marguerite, before in turn advancing towards the stage. We learn that Claire spent most of her time alone in her garden. At the table, she no longer spoke. He escaped, had lovers while she locked herself in her thoughts. Which ones? The husband doesn’t really know anything about it. He gave up.

The murderer speaks

Finally here is Claire, played by the actress Dominique Reymond, hair stuck in a ponytail, a severe black dress giving her the air of Môme Piaf or a priest’s servant. His voice is dense, abrasive, ironic, magnetic. Who is this woman? What did she experience and, above all, lose along the way? She was believed to be aphasic, the murderer speaks and even a lot. In front of her, Nicolas/Marguerite tries to lead her little by little to the motive behind her actions and to the admission of this anomaly: the victim’s head is missing. Before us a labyrinth gradually emerges, that of Claire’s madness, of her obsessive thoughts to which we should have paid attention, to which we should have responded, years ago already, when it wasn’t too much. “If she hadn’t killed her, she would have killed me,” says the husband. During this exchange, the husband prowls behind the scenes, attentive and solitary.

Nicolas/Marguerite may lead this ball of questions and answers, but the essential thing eludes him/her. “The English Lover”, an electric interrogation piece without being static, skilfully polished so as not to be just a detective story, retains its unfathomable mystery. “Sublime, inevitably sublime Claire L.”, Marguerite Duras could have added.

Thierry Sartoretti/mh

“The English Amante” by Marguerite Duras, directed by Emilie Charriot, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, until December 8, 2024; Théâtre de Saint-Gervais, Geneva, from January 30 to February 2, 2025.