It all starts on February 28, 2020, during a particularly agitated Césars ceremony: that evening, the members of the academy choose to award the best director award to Roman Polanski, who is accused by several women of sexual assault. Can we dissociate the quality of a work from the career of its author? So what to do with Gauguin, Céline or Coco Chanel?
Few are those who will now escape the delicate questioning, and especially not Étienne Gaudillère, a young author and 34-year-old actor. On stage, he chooses to open the most important pages of his “logbook” which we share, for a little over an hour, all the emotions that we have to go through to better “understand”.
→ DEBATE. Polanski at the cinema: to go or not?
The performance, which begins as a one-man show and ends in concert, is given until January 23 at the Théâtre du Point du Jour, in the 5th arrondissement of Lyon – it will then be played at the Villefranche-sur-Saône theater , from April 13 to 15. It is the fifth edition of Grand ReporTERRE, an event presented to the public twice a season.
The principle ? Giving carte blanche to an artist, accompanied by the journalist of his choice, to transform a hotly topical subject into a creation with, as the only constraint, a single week of rehearsal. A space to bring forth “a median temporality, halfway between that of the media and that of the stage”, according to Éric Massé and Angélique Clairand, the duo at the head of the establishment.
An artistic and media laboratory
At the heart of the decor – entirely composed of press covers and book covers –, Giulia Foïs, journalist and author of I am one in two (which recounts her journey after a rape, at the age of 20), whose presence guides her reflection, and two actors, Marion Aeschlimann and Jean-Philippe Salério, who give her substance.
The first, seated at her desk, plays a dual role: that of the expert who does not hesitate to compare figures and historical facts, even if they are difficult to hear, and that of the “little voice”, who is responsible for warning against misinterpretations or shortcuts, without however adopting a moralizing posture.
The energy of the two actors can thus be put entirely at the service of humor and emotion, necessary to illustrate sad news, like this endless list of tweets and press dispatches, straight out of the wave #MeToo…
By touching the intimate sphere as much as the public sphere, this creation imposes itself as an artistic and media laboratory: its initiators certainly do not guarantee the spectator to find a clear answer, but simply invite him to participate in a debate of a new genre, peaceful and grounded, which we would probably need more often.