Spectacle
Article reserved for subscribers
True to his vein of documentary theatre, Mohamed El Khatib this time stages elderly people who take stock of their love lives and discuss their desires without taboos.
Last performance in Brussels for The Secret Life of Old People before jumping into the deep end of Avignon. Mohamed El Khatib was refining his new creation at the end of May with seven old men and women, all amateurs, gathered on the set after responding to this announcement: “If you’re over 75 and have romance, call me.”
The director is reassured: “Yesterday it was still very fluid, but now everything is in place.” And it was not a given: Chille had a stroke, so learning a text is a miracle. Jacqueline, the former presenter of the television news in Belgium, who opens the play, is 91 years old. “In November, we did a residency, Raconte El Khatib. In March we meet again for a penultimate step, and there, she asks me who I am, what this project is. It’s very fragile.” A fragility which is the strength of this documentary theater by opening the stage to people outside the theater, non-professional bodies to hear unformatted words. “The elderly are marginalized; journalists, caregivers, their own children speak in their place. I would never have entrusted their words to actors,” specifies El Khatib who questions the ready-to-think: “At first, I thought I would work on their memory, but it was really too cliché: the loss of autonomy, the decrepitu
