Through Writing Lille
Published on
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And if we had to relearn how to return to North Theater, on the Grand place in Lille (North) ? Just to remember this exceptional alchemy which often arises between a text, sometimes unknown, one or more actors, speaking in a bare voice, like a cappella and the spectators … What does it matter if this show, PIN, played in June 2021, is the last in a season that did not take place.
Around a character
Theater. In the small room, of course. Around a single character. Yes, it’s true. For an astonishing text made up of a succession of onomatopoeias, words, succession of images or pieces of interior dialogue, in short, unrelated sentences, thus dropped almost at random on the slope of madness with the words of a drunken man, who knows he is at the end of his life and who is accompanied by the sounds they produce to overcome his loneliness and his drift. The oldest will remember Gildas Bourdet’s Saperleau where the same succession of words generated poetry.
Writing: a master of German theater, little known in France, Rainald Goetz, and his translator Christine Seghezzi. To the directing or staging, Alain Françon, to whom many theater spectators owe their greatest theatrical emotions, and who proposed in particular a Misanthrope completely offbeat, on the stage of the Théâtre du Nord during the 2018-2019 season. After having directed the greatest theatrical houses and in particular the Théâtre de la Colline, collected so many staging prizes, at more than 76 years old, he persists in clearing and enriching the theatrical heritage.
A man adrift
And then of course an actor on whom everything rests. Antoine Mathieu, who has already played in the same small room of the Théâtre du Nord a pathetic Those who remain, by David Lescot. Alternately interviewer and victim of the Shoah, he played with a decor made up of two simple chairs on a white wall to arouse emotion, and often tears. Here in such a simple setting, he embodies this adrift man, on the verge of madness, who delivers his last dialogue before dying. Despair mingles with childhood memories, with past laughter. One last breath of 75 minutes.
Jean-Michel Stievenard
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