La période d'exploitation au Théâtre est terminée.
The disappearance of the landscape
A man speaks, motionless, unable to move since a terrorist attack in a café reduced him to a life in a wheel-chair. He remembers the explosion, and then everything evaporates. Here he is, in front of a window in Ostend, abandoned, condemned to his thoughts, his memories, his minutely detailed observations. He sees an impressive building site coming to life: apparently a high wall is under construction, a wall that little by little invades the window space, hides the view, darkens and imprisons him in the room in which he sits. Thoughts and memories grow dark in turn. The explosion seems to come back. The shock was so violent, so total.
Could it be that the man had in fact died instantly?
I have known Jean-Philippe Toussaint for a few years. I recorded his text Football, but had been reading his writings since about 1984, always moved by each work. I like his style, his humour, his clarity, even in gloom. He makes me think simultaneously of Hergé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (for the clarity of his writing), and of the film maker Lee Chan-Dong, who made Poetry and Burning.
He offered me this text about a year ago in a Parisian café – he insisted on handing it to me in person. This discretion surprised me, as if we were in a spy film. He hadn’t published it at the time (by Minuit, like all his other books), and was not keen on having it published – maybe only after I perform it. Fine, agreed, I received it as a beginning of a mission: to pass this text through the echo chamber of the theatre.
How can this stream of thoughts, sensations, reminiscences be heard (shown)?
And what to do with the death, always present, already there, a shadow and an instant? We needed a particular space, something new. Aurélien Bory got interested in the project. In the café where we also met, he began making sketches around the theme of a window gradually closing up. A number of different spaces surfaced slowly in our common world of imagination that started taking shape.
That kind of thinking is very stimulating. I read the text, the play-to-be, several times. One can feel in it the anxiety, worrying, the common and deaf anxiety of us all. Anxiety that has lost its name, its form, its contours, so much has it grown, spread, even though at times it seems to have evaporated. It makes us appreciate more both the quiet sharpness of the language and the blast of the explosion. It sweeps the world in one second, and it is in that particular second that we live - with elegance, refinement. I hope that our mission will be accomplished to the general satisfaction. One could say that this is one of the missions of the theatre itself: to give voice, body, space and time to the texts of great writers, to the literature of our strange times.
Denis Podalydès
Text Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Set design & stage direction Aurélien Bory
Light design Arno Veyrat
Music Joan Cambon
Technical design of the set Pierre Dequivre
Costumes Manuela Agnesini
Artistic and technical collaboration Stéphane Chipeaux-Dardé
With
Denis Podalydès of the Comédie Française
Production Centre International de Créations Théâtrales / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord
Coproduction Compagnie 111 – Aurélien Bory ; ThéâtredelaCité - centre dramatique national Toulouse Occitanie ; Théâtre National du Luxembourg ; Théâtre Princesse Grace Monaco ; Équinoxe-Scène Nationale de Châteauroux ; TNB – Théâtre National de Bretagne ; Les Hivernales du Festival d'Anjou ; La Coursive - Scène Nationale de La Rochelle
The set was manufactured in the construction workshop of Théâtre de la Cité
This play has received a production grant from the City Council of Toulouse.
The text has been published by Editions de Minuit.
Show duration : around 1h10
In partnership with Arte, France Inter and Télérama.
Prices
Full price Cat. 1 = 34€ Cat. 2 = 26€ Cat. 3 = 18€ |
Reduced price* Cat. 1 = 30€ Cat. 2 = 24€ Cat. 3 = 15€ |
Youth fares** Cat. 1 = 26€ Cat. 2 = 21€ Cat. 3 = 14€ |
Suscriber prices
Full price Cat. 1 = 28€ Cat. 2 = 22€ Cat. 3 = 14€ |
Reduced price* Cat. 1 = 24€ Cat. 2 = 20€ Cat. 3 = 12€ |
Youth fares** Cat. 1 = 21€ Cat. 2 = 17€ Cat. 3 = 11€ |
(*) Reduced price : + than 65 years old, job seekers on presentation of a proof and group rates (from 10 people)
(**) Youth rates : - than 26 years old, on presentation of a proof
Press contact
MYRA
Rémi Fort et Valentine Arnaud
01 40 33 79 13 / myra@myra.fr / www.myra.fr