Jean-Luc Lagarce and Vincent Dedienne: theater, writing and life

Through two shows directed by Johanny Bert, “Le Journal” and “ Juste la fin du monde”, Vincent Dedienne brings back to life the French playwright who died of AIDS at the age of 38, in 1995. A spectral and terribly vivid dive that the quivering actor, with other performers, offers us to share at the Théâtre de l'Atelier.

“Nothing ever happened to me”

Of the eight hundred pages of Journal that Jean-Luc Lagarce blackened for more than twenty years, from 1977 to 1995, the year of his disappearance, the actor Vincent Dedienne has extracted the most powerful, the most significant pages from the life of this author who died too soon, long unknown of the general public, but who finds his place today at the forefront of contemporary French theater authors. In front of a half-open black curtain, on which, on each side, are inscribed the beautiful drawings of the artist Irène Vignaud, sitting next to him, Vincent Dedienne, in black leather jeans, a smile at the corner of his mouth of ironic comma, distills with its rapid delivery the intimate nuggets of this work. Childhood in a working-class family in the Doubs, in the 1950s, his studies and his first emotions in Besançon where he discovered philosophy and theater at the same time, then the creation in 1977 of the theater company that he will never let go: the Théâtre de la Roulotte, in homage to Jean Vilar.

Vincent Dedienne dives into the author's crude words, savoring a surgical precision and full of emotion, having fun with his irony and his caustic humor. Homosexuality and the race towards desire, the romanticism of the life of an artist whose work will never be published during his lifetime, the certainty of death which hovers like a fatal shadow at his side. Sex, life and death, writing and theater are the active engines of this courageous marathon which circulates repetitions, dates and clinical details. The writing, in Lagarce, tells the story of his entire life and makes him a character mirroring our 80s. It is a vibrant and intimate testimony that is offered to us, and this sharing, cruel, terrible at the same time that moving, actually reveals how the intimacy of the self is articulated with the intimacy of the scene.

“Just the end of the world”

After the Journal which features the author in an assumed autobiography, here is his last play, written in Berlin in 1990, and which was sadly refused at the time by all the publishers. It is today translated, like all the work, throughout the world and in the French baccalaureate program. Louis, the author's double, returns to his family after thirty years of absence. He knows he is condemned by illness and has come to announce it to his family, but will never be able to tell them. There is his mother, sensitive Christianne Millet, his brother Antoine, played with an impressive presence by Loïc Riewer, his brother's wife, Astrid Bayiha and his little sister Suzanne, played by Céleste Brunnquell. But Louis, played by Vincent Dedienne, says almost nothing and what he fears, what he fears, what he thinks is found implicitly in the words of the other characters, as well as in Lagarce's diary that we can listen to the first part.

Johanny Bert chose to place all these little people at the front of the stage, on a bare stage, while the furniture of the family home is suspended: bicycle, armchair, floor lamp, punching ball and other game and play accessories. life hovers in the air, as if real life were elsewhere. The father appears as a puppet with a huge head. What remains are the living ghosts of an unstable era that Louis comes to revisit, like a stranger who already knows that the links with his family no longer exist. This is perhaps what explains the distanced, or too naturalistic, treatment of Johanny Bert's direction. The characters are there, as if strangers to each other, without the element of mystery, uncertainty, enigma and anguish, of embarrassment, which generates the text of Lagarce which acts by peripheral convolutions, in search of the right word and the sincere word that seeks to spring forth. Everything remains singularly strange and we would like the theater here to give back to the text and the characters its vibration, its shift, essential to life on a set. However, let us salute this production which puts Jean-Luc Lagarce in the spotlight and for a wide audience.

Helen Kuttner