It’s a world cut in two. On the one hand, the lands of the “possible”, on the other, those of the “impossible”, devastated by misery, disease, bruised by the blind madness of wars. From one shore to the other, women and men devote their lives to helping their fellow human beings. In this world, ours of course, their humanitarian vocation fascinates and intrigues.
Invited to put on a show for the brand new Comédie de Genève, Tiago Rodrigues, future director of the Festival d’Avignon, wanted to know more about them. His initial plan to follow them in the field defeated by the pandemic, he then decided to build his play on stories entrusted by around thirty humanitarian workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. From these testimonies collected with his four actors, Adrien Barazzone, Beatriz Brás, Baptiste Coustenoble and Natacha Koutchoumov, was born a play blurring the boundaries, at the confluence of reality and fiction.
→ PORTRAIT. Tiago Rodrigues appointed head of the Avignon festival
By a clever shift of roles, the public is placed in the position of interviewer facing artists now in the shoes of the humanitarians they themselves have interviewed. “So what do you want to know?” »they ask. “We are not heroes”assures one of them while another advances his own reflections: “Why do we travel so far to help? » And all agree on the need to “show the complexity” of their reality, intertwined between personal ideals and the opaque puzzle of a planetary geopolitics.
“An umbrella under a tsunami”
Tiago Rodrigues brilliantly takes the opposite view of this imperative, relying entirely on the strength of the theatrical narrative, the antithesis of a documentary or supposedly exhaustive approach. Under his pen, there is no need for geographical precision, this “impossible” speaks for itself, and the anecdotes, brought in turn by the four actors, fit together to form a stunning fresco. The movements of the text marry those of the vast white canvas that covers the stage.
Shaped using pulleys operated by the actors themselves, the draperies, bathed in changing light, sometimes represent the relief of a mountain, sometimes the precarious shelter of a field hospital or the warm tent of a storyteller at the wake. Under this delicate vault vibrate words heavy with a reality that goes beyond them: this feeling of holding “an umbrella under a tsunami”from “stop water leaks with your hands” or this observation, of a simple and terrible beauty, “the face of a mother who sees her child suffer is the same in the possible and the impossible”.
In his subjective depiction of humanitarian action, composed through the eyes of those who experience it from the inside, Tiago Rodrigues avoids the pitfalls that could have marred his enterprise: no naïveté (this anger of a woman to the discovery of the pedophile acts of one of his colleagues), no pathos or sensationalism (the stories are interrupted before crossing an unhealthy line).
The fury of the unspeakable
With generous tact, the director leads the spectators towards horizons where the pangs of impossible choices rub shoulders with amazement – the image of this young volunteer armed with a stick to protect herself from the people she wanted to help – but also beautiful encounters, like that of this “mythological little footballer”.
The bleachers suddenly hold their breath: a group goes in search of a wounded man, the belligerents have stopped firing to let them pass and the narrator dreams that she is suspending time to hear this silence again. The theater offers him this magnificent power, and later still, a thrill at the singing of Beatriz Brás rises as a shield against fear. In the center, the musician Gabriel Ferrandi – gradually revealed by the play of hangings – roars his percussion throughout the piece until an incredible final solo, an explosion of sounds to express the fury of the unspeakable.
→ CRITICAL. “King Lear Syndrome”: the theater of lost souls
The chaos of a raw present lingers in the distance, and yet at times surprisingly palpable. Power of the theatre, unparalleled watchtower, which jostles and connects fragmented humanity.