My Traitor

My traitor forms a diptych with De beaux lendemains (The Sweet Hereafter), performed at Bouffes du Nord in June 2011.  Impossible mourning for fourteen children killed in a school bus accident.  Impossible mourning for a friend that betrayed you. They both take a common form of a funeral sermon, of a funeral rite, an antique threnody that brings to mind the life of the diseased. 

One day Emmanuel Meirieu told me that he would like to adapt two of my novels for theatre, as a single piece, under the title Mon traître – My Traitor. He explained that the silent words from those pages could be whispered or screamed. He was convinced of this. And I said yes. I knew his adaptation of Russel Banks’ novel The Sweet Hereafter and also of Joe Connelly’s book, Bringing out the dead. Each time human beings tell their story as if they were alone on stage, for ever. 
In Banks’s story four witnesses grieve their children killed in a school bus accident. In Connelly’s, two ambulance drivers in New-York become little by little haunted by those that they could not save. Meirieu made cuts in these texts. He did the same with mine.  Straightforward cuts, disappearance of lines, characters, theatre is a different adventure.  And I said yes.  Yes to the fusion of two books, yes to round trips, yes to missing chapters and to added glances. This time, after Banks’ snow and Connelly’s night, it’s an Irish story that Emmanuel Meirieu tells us. Story of a traitor and the betrayed.  But I did ask him one favour : to see nothing, to hear nothing, to know nothing in advance. To not intervene at any point in his work.  By doing so, I offered him to share My Traitor. I proposed that he make this intimate grief his own.  And I took refuge in the role of a spectator, the one protected by the darkness. And I did well. I attended a performance of Emmanuel Meirieu’s piece. It was last April in Lausanne. And I was captured. I saw Antoine, the betrayed, and Tyrone, the traitor, come to life under the rain.  I watched the shadow of Jack, Tyrone’s son, listened to his voice asking his dead father to come back to life. I heard words of ink and paper transformed into a storm.  I did not exprect such power.  Such force. This « terrible beauty ». And I wept, like the others, in the darkness that protected me.


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