Known for his very visual pieces, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci takes over the Maison de la Culture in Bobigny, the MC93. With “Bros”, a diminutive of “brothers” which means “brothers” in English, he stages more than thirty men dressed in police uniforms on a set cluttered with machines of all kinds. They carry out orders received in headsets. A theater made of a series of actions without words to highlight the question of obedience and individual responsibility.
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theater
when the economy lets itself be rediscovered on the boards
written by Alexandra Hartman Editor-in-Chief
Does the economy bother you? It’s that you haven’t met Angie and Nono yet. This duo of “economy surfers” presents, in one hour and in a breathtaking style, the history of the discipline during a “theatrical conference” given at the Cité de l’économie in Paris.
The institution, which opened two and a half years ago in the former Hôtel Gaillard, in the neo-Renaissance style, is behind the show. “The commission included talking regarding a number of authors like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx”, remembers Jérémie Lebreton, the director. If the second is “passed by the wayside”, the creator, associated with a playwright, allowed himself to go back much further in time.
A “wave” formed since… Plato
The “conference” therefore opens with Plato, convinced that the well-being of the city cannot tolerate that the way in which its people are structured stems only from the principles of commercial exchanges. The contradiction brought to it by Aristotle, who was more “accommodating” with the market, then gave rise to a breaking wave… which is breaking to this day. In constant search of balance on this wave, Angie and Nono wonder: can we reconcile the desires, sometimes impulsive, unthinking, of man, with the work of reason?
The age of enlightenment, the theory of « main invisible » of the Scottish Smith are carefully treated, theorizing the pursuit of individual well-being as the basis of the wealth of nations. A century later he was answered by Marxist thought, inseparable from the historical context of the forced industrialization of Europe and the domination of the bourgeoisie, with its “owner” and consumerist ideology.
A show given in high schools
To accompany their words, twirling, the two teacher-surfers deploy, at regular intervals, two large rollers in the background. The illustrations plunge into an atmosphere, like a series, “pop art” style, by John Maynard Keynes, the herald of revival through consumption to dodge the horrors of the Great Depression of the 1930s… until the risk of exhaustion .
“It’s a simple decor, which allows it to be moved easily from one place to another”, explains Jérémie Lebreton. The show, which aims to appeal to everyone, was offered in several high schools in the Paris region. “It worked very well, continues the director. His writing allows for flexibility, and opens up possibilities for interaction with the audience. »
“This morning, I went to see if our theater was still standing…” A cavernous voice rises from a figure hunched over the flickering flame of a candle, the only light from a darkened stage. The theater: this old madman whose most extravagant fabrications often draw the most implacable reflection of reality. Through this preamble that looks like a secret ceremony, the author and director Elsa Granat invites us to visit this thousand-year-old ancestor, to lend an ear to what he has been whispering, tirelessly for millennia, under the veneer of entertainment. .
→ CRITICAL. “Royan”: Nicole Garcia, the drama with her eyes closed
On the day of his youngest daughter’s wedding, a man suffers a stroke. When he regains consciousness, suddenly using a phrasing with Elizabethan elegance, he evokes a kingdom to be shared and assures that he will offer the largest piece of it to that of his three daughters who will show him the deepest love. . The diagnosis is in: suffering from a Lewy body disease, he has developed KLS, “King Lear Syndrome”, which plunges him into the greatest dependence, and his children must resolve to place him in an nursing home.
A light despite the pain
Brilliantly intertwining her own writing with excerpts from Shakespeare’s play, Elsa Granat thrusts the audience into the heart of an ontological peregrination of overwhelming acuity. The sadly realistic decor of a common room in nursing homes becomes a hostile moor where the storm that shakes Lear’s brain has nothing to envy to the bad weather that the character wipes away under Shakespeare’s pen.
His companion in misfortune, Gloucester, here a lady with rampant dementia, will never know that his beloved son Edgar will have accompanied him until his last breath. It took audacity to send King Lear to a retirement home, and Elsa Granat is aiming just as this limbo seems to concentrate the springs of the tragedy: the vertigo of senility, the disarray hemmed with guilt of the families and the malaise of the staff. of these establishments.
The scenography follows Lear’s shift, from the colors of the outside and active world to the neutral gray of time suspended on the walls of the institution where an explosively energetic cast bubbles. Bernadette Le Saché, enigmatic guide from the first minutes, operates a striking transformation: irresistible at first as an authoritarian wedding planner, then heartbreaking in Gloucester, amnesia as a form of blindness.
Laurent Huon is a magnificent Lear, shrouded in fragility and mystery. Clara Guipont, she embodies a caregiver between exhaustion and empathy, alongside Antony Cochin, lunar neurologist unable to pronounce the word correctly “degeneration”. If the throats are often tied on a few rises of grief, they are also released in great bursts of laughter. A light despite the pain: the theater of life.
What is mercy? The dictionary tells us that it is compassion for the misery of others. Tiphaine Raffier, playwright and director, interweaves in her play “The response of men” nine stories of mercy that questions us regarding our empathy. How far can we forgive? “The response of men” is to be seen until January 28 at the Amandiers theater in Nanterre and then on tour throughout France.