telephone booths, Monty Python and ecological anxiety at the Avignon festival
“Phone Me”: Lives in a Booth
Who doesn’t experience the melancholy of telephone booths? Removed in 2018, they took with them a world of possibilities that the excellent company Fouic (Jean-Christophe Dollé and Clotilde Morgiève) brings to life by applying its method: marginal characters, proven science of the script, hard-hitting staging. All with an aesthetic always licked, bringing the viewer back to a recent but erased France, as for I fly… and the rest I will tell to the shadowswhich relays the dark life of the author of the Nanterre massacre in 2002.
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France has counted up to 300,000 telephone booths. phone me keeps three which, each, sum up three moments: the Occupation, Mitterrand’s France in 1981 and that of 1998. The three stories that take place there (a forbidden love, a homeless man who makes the place his home, a young rebellious enclosure) constituting a « genealogical puzzle whose logic of unveiling produces a mechanics of affects that can sense the recipe, precisely because it falls “too” right. But it’s sometimes moving, often funny, and nonetheless poignant.
At the Théâtre 11 Avignon until July 29, then on tour in six cities in France until May 2023.
“The human bomb”: the collapse, inside oneself
Ecological anxiety haunts more and more young creations, especially in Avignon. Here, at the Doms theater assigned to Belgian companies, the young director as Vincent Hennebicq begins by telling what he wants to tell. Let’s explain: the author met his creative intentions in abyss by confessing his difficulties in creating a piece on the subject. It’s clever, especially since he then leaves it to the actress Eline Schumacher to tell the rest, only intervening then as an aside. Because the actress puts into words, in a setting of cans, empty bottles and party favors, the hangover of a generation that takes a reality in the face: the party is over. Not that the consumer society has stopped, but we know the social and ecological horror it creates.
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Anguish, guilt, denial… The actress recounts these emotions through a learning story staged the genesis of the show. The whole gives the opportunity for a salutary (and solid) pedagogy on climate issues, through interviews with (real) experts and public actors. The extent of the staging – there are also sound recordings and two musicians – makes us regret the excessive place given to Eline’s monologue, in other words a lack of polyphony, which does not prevent The human bomb to succeed in its bet: to offer a sounding board to the affects that pierce through youth.
At the Théâtre des Doms until July 28.
“In the name of the father”: intimacies of a theater of reality
Author and director Ahmad Madani, who dazzled us last year with Incandescentlast part of his trilogy Facing their destiny on life in working-class neighborhoods, returns with a single person on stage. Because it’s Anissa, one of the actresses of the second part F(l)ames, who talks about his story. The device has nothing of the scenic scale ofIncandescent, but keeps the intention of a theater of reality, told by non-professionals that Ahmed Madani knows how to reveal. Public enlightened story, director on the set, preparation of pastries offered at the exit by an actress who tells us the truth of her real life: the quest for a father she has never known, gone to live in the States United, and that she has always been looking for.
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The choice is daring, because this narration told in a kitchen as the only setting confuses the viewer. The boundaries between the game and the real are blurred, and we wonder where it will lead us. Especially since the second quarter of the show drags on, until the mechanics engage and the whole seizes us. Because this quest, linked to the support of videos (real, of course), engages the spectator towards unexpected emotional territories, and for some troubling. The Madani mechanics are there, with this ability to dig into intimacy without shamelessness and emotions without showing off. Which is a significant feat.
At the Théâtre 11 Avignon until July 29, then on tour in ten cities in France and Brussels until March 2023.
“Fire choirs very rarely sing songs relating to Marcel Proust”: a treat of British humor
It’s good to laugh, and this piece with a title too long to write it twice reminds us of that. This one, composed from the texts of the Monty Python’s BBC broadcasts, is presented as a radio program. This unity serves above all as an excuse to do anything, and this is precisely the salt of humorous show Britishwhere the Louis-Defunesque Patrice Thibaud excels in particular: imitation of animals (with a real dog that plays the cat!), interviews of corpses to learn about life after death, scene of argument within the FLJ (Front de liberation of biblical Judea), sex education lessons… Swarming with mimes, misunderstandings and exaggerations, the show is a tribute to this absurdly twisted humor which has the courtesy to make us laugh while avoiding asking us to think.
At the Fire Station theater until July 26th.