René Loyon is directing Et moi et le silence, a play by Naomi Wallace, an essential voice in American theater today (1). In the 1950s, two young girls, one black, the other white, become acquainted in prison. A passionate friendship unites them, up to a loving connivance that is hard to tell. They decide not to leave each other, invent an ancillary destiny, train themselves to become maids (one thinks of Genet, like the Instructions to servants, by Swift). The trick is that the actresses who play Jamie and Dee double up over a nine-year span that spans from incarceration to dreamy, miserable “freedom.” It’s all the more subtle since we first discover the relaxed couple, then locked up, over short, strongly rhythmic sequences, until the fall, which finally reunites the two Jamie (Sarah Labrin and Juliette Speck) and the two Dees (Morgane Real and Roxanne Roux).
The outburst in the game is magnificent, with mood swings, early shattered impulses, giggles, sulks, rage. The whole, hollow under so much vitality, suggests the cruelty of the society of exploitation and segregation, in an inventive, familiar language, of great elegance, brilliantly translated by Dominique Hollier. Loyon handled this masterfully, on a Spartan stage (scenography by Nicolas Sire); a bed, a table, two chairs, under skilful lights by Laurent Castaingt. A small shape with a big meaning.
René Fix takes us to Hollywood, with his play She dreamed of a farm in Africa, directed by Claudia Morin (2). This one plays Karen Blixen, the Danish novelist whose 1937 book, brought to the cinema by Sidney Pollack in 1985 under the title Out of Africa, brings together Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Claudia Morin offers us an infinitely plausible ex-baroness, with a smoking voice and scathing repartee, facing an impresario (Philippe Caulier), eager to adapt for the stage, this time, the said novel, A farm in Africa, whose first role would go to her mistress, Shelley, a young film star whom the woman of letters takes under her wing and whom Julie Timmerman interprets with grace. An ingenious piece, a finely hemmed initiatory story, with musical whiffs of Africa.
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