2023-10-13 15:26:54
– McBurney’s theater avenges nature without skimping on means
The former co-director of the Comedy marks her posterity by programming “On the bones of the dead”, a spell that she had the good idea to co-produce.
Published today at 5:26 p.m.
Ten extraordinary actors move between humanity and animality in “On the Bones of the Dead”.
ALEX BRENNER
She strides onto the large, almost empty stage of the Comedy, down jacket on my back, plastic bag in hand. And she talks. For almost three hours, she talks furiously, barely catching her breath. Here is Janina, a Polish retiree living near the Czech border, who is keen to save nature against human aggression. On stage, it’s the shamanic Amanda Hadingue, emeritus member of the theater company Complicity that the British actor and director Simon McBurney has been taking for forty years.
Under the auspices of a masked ball where the guests disguise themselves as animals, the murder of yet another hunter is planned.
ALEX BRENNER
Janina spoke in 2009, written by the Polish writer Olga TokarczukNobel Prize for Literature 2018, from a land called «Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead» (“On the bones of the dead”) in homage to the English poet William Blake, who reigns there as a sylph. She hasn’t let go of the spittoon since, and her listeners remain hanging on her lips, clinging as much to the suspense of her story as to the urgency of her words.
Shamanic Amanda Hadingue carries out her investigation while the nine other members of the troupe illustrate her story.
ALEX BRENNER
One by one, men from his region die murdered. From the poacher neighbor to the landowner, from the cop to the priest, everyone has in common a passion for hunting and mistreatment of animals. Could it be that deer, foxes and wild boars, but also domestic dogs and insects, have taken revenge? Would the forest regain its rights? Janina continues her investigation, drawing on her knowledge as an astrologer and her experience as an ostracized old witch. The truth that will emerge revives the verses of another William, Shakespeare this time: “There is no beast so ferocious that it does not know some pity. But I don’t know any, and so I’m not a beast.”
At the Comédie, the backdrop serves as a mirror, a trompe-l’oeil and many other things.
ALEX BRENNER
Author, heroine, actress and director: with a few other actors, it is a majority of sixty-year-olds who carry this breathtaking anti-speciesist thriller at arm’s length. And with what vigor, what verve! As the narrative expands, it capsizes into a representation eager to mock the rule of three units. Characters come out of the woodwork, dialogues take place. Corpses appear, deer appear. Love even declares itself. The show, at the same time, shifts into the marvelous.
Because if Simon McBurney opts in principle for material purity, he does not skimp on the means of theatrical illusion. The economy of objects arranged on the stage corresponds to the profusion of intangible technological processes. If ten actors are enough to sketch an entire population, we don’t count the use of video, sound and light effects, musical inserts and other perlimpinpin powders to support the text. At the risk of drowning out the magic? What the hell, that of the cosmos remains unsinkable. But it is the universe that our valiant band of old men has in their sights.
«Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead», jusqu’au 21 oct. à la Comédie, comedie.ch
Katia Berger has been a journalist in the cultural section since 2012. She covers current events in the performing arts, particularly through theater or dance reviews, but also sometimes deals with photography, visual arts or literature.More ‘info
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