Comédie-Française, October 4, 2024.” sizes=”(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw” width=”664″ height=”443″/> Léa Lopez, Adrien Simion, Clément Bresson, Christian Gonon, Yoann Gasiorowski, during rehearsals for “Suicidé”, by Nicolaï Erdman, directed by Stéphane Varupenne, at the Comédie-Française, October 4, 2024. VINCENT PONTET
And bang! A man is dead. A man had to die. But is it really the right one? The useful dead, the one who was supposed to be used to resolve some small problems? The humor grates and delights, in this jewel of the Russian repertoire which is The Suicideby Nicolaï Erdman, whom we were particularly happy to find at the Comédie-Française, in a production by Stéphane Varupenne, one of the troupe’s actors. Weary! This Suicide appeared very sluggish, shooting himself in the foot by remaining on the surface on the vaudevilleesque dimension of the piece.
Nicolaï Erdman wrote it at the turn of 1928 and 1929, at the moment when Stalinist Russia began to descend into terror, this comedy which highlights both the totalitarian excesses of the revolution in progress and the mediocrities of the small-scale spirit. bourgeois. In line with Gogol’s great comedies, the author deploys black Russian humor, acid and absurd, at its peak. He paid dearly for it: upon its publication in 1930, the play was banned by the censors. Nicolaï Erdman would live in relegation until 1949, when he was allowed to return to Moscow, and would no longer write anything significant. It was not until 1990 that The Suicide finally went to Russia.
The play therefore has a somewhat mythical aura, and, in recent years, with the rise of a new form of terror in Russia, it has returned to the stage. However, it is not easy to stage. Its political and metaphysical funds and double funds make up its greatness, behind the mechanics of vaudeville à la Labiche. It all begins with a domestic scene, in the municipal (community apartment) where Semyon Semionovitch, the antihero of the play, lives. And it all begins with a major problem: hunger – which has as much importance for Erdman as for Brecht at the same time, as the anthropological driving force of the war of all against all.
Behind closed doors without privacy
Sémione, an ordinary little man, devirilized and discredited since he became unemployed, wakes his wife in the middle of the night because he wants to eat liver sausage. The wife sends him away and, suddenly, Semione threatens to commit suicide. From there, a crazy mechanism begins, in the closed door without privacy where the characters live. The news that a man wants to die spreads like wildfire, to all levels of society. The suicide, once dead, will have to speak, in a world where the living no longer have the right to speak. All the pressure groups in Moscow will therefore try to appropriate Semione’s post-mortem message: religion, intellectuals, bourgeois women defending romantic love and fine lingerie or artisan butchers.
