Fanny Ardant is at Studio Marigny in “The Wound and the Thirst”, text by Laurence Plazenet and direction by Catherine Schaub for a few exceptional performances until the beginning of June. She is, without hesitation, without contest, without sycophancy, in complete objectivity, the greatest French actress. Seeing her cleanses your mind of all the baseness of the world.
Until now – I will soon be fifty in a few weeks – I had never seen love on stage. Rising love, emotion and fall, the seismograph panicked by the meeting of two beings whom everything attracts and prevents, impossibility and fault as redemption. The fatality that sets beloved souls on fire. The refusal to compromise and resign. The fire that leaves bodies inert and hearts in disarray, this scorched earth of forbidden lovers that dries up the nights. Despite the chaos, the murderous morals and the flouted honor, History in progress, a thin hope persists, drums and does not give up. This net of life marks with a hot iron the couples touched by grace and the instinct of death. Love is this indocile and capricious child who comes to impact the most hardened characters, the most resistant to abandonment cannot extinguish this incandescent flame. It glows and consumes.
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I had clearly seen approximations, gropings, touches, sometimes convincing and then the feeling fled, fled; fleeting and impalpable, it passed like a gust of wind. A gust of wind and we forgot the performance. Certain actresses came close to it, made it, for an instant, alive and messy, pulsating and boneless, their talent and their knowledge of the profession were not enough, they were far, very far, from this duplication. They could charm, intrigue, amuse, without ever achieving the brilliance of a voice, the inner thrills that make a room of one man stand up. Last night, after an hour and a half, the applause was endless, tears were streaming down the cheeks of my neighbors. Fanny Ardant is not only possessed by the text, she transposes all the nuances, all the crevices, she is breath and comma, excitement and tear, enjoyment and darkness, tears and sun. She does not recite, she does not even play, she is the most faithful, the most sincere, the most sanguine representation of a woman who for thirty years loved her lover against himself and against herself.
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God and the justice of men are very weak bulwarks before a lover determined not to betray herself. It took me a night walk in an almost frozen Paris to land, to get back into the right rhythm of my steps, they no longer knew how to move forward, these simpletons. Did I really want to leave this stifling and wonderful greenhouse where Fanny had put emotions, real sensations on uncertain impulses and intellectual combinations? Perhaps some spectators, when they wake up this morning, still have the noise of Fanny within them, the voice of desire rising and the bruises of a heady silence… Fanny Ardant is love, in its fluctuations and its atrocious retractions , in its influence and its celestial truth. She is skin, fluid, brokenness and splinters, adoration and devotion. Alone on stage, Fanny is everything. Nobility and overlap. Modest and desirable. As soon as she pronounces the first lines of Laurence Plazenet’s novel, the room is in unison, the room is her mirror, the room is suspended on her lips, she follows every movement, every tiny inclination, every hollow of her wrists , each breath extinguished. In the purity of a stage stripped of artifice, on a sober play of lights ranging from morning dew to evening terror, in her midnight blue train, Fanny illuminates the world with her theatrical genius. If until last night I had never seen love, I had also not seen the light that elevates actresses to the rank of divinity. In a society where each individual believes they are invested with divine power, Fanny reestablishes the scales of values. It is not too daring, too presumptuous, too talkative to say that Fanny Ardant is, to this day, the greatest French actress.
Fanny Ardant in “The Wound and the Thirst” – Studio Marigny Paris 8th. Until June 1, 2024.
