Pascal Rambert and Arthur Nauzyciel, a play to describe male violence

In a play written for the director Arthur Nauzyciel, Pascal Rambert flushes out reality in the form of a scouring fable on the violence of the world and of men as much as on the revenge of women.

From vertical, here, there is little more than the steel lair where live isolated, caged in their frustration, four brothers lumberjacks and their servant. Outside, a petrified, ransacked, felled forest vibrates with abysmal silence. It is often said that reality goes beyond fiction.

With My brothers, a play by Pascal Rambert written for his friend Arthur Nauzyciel, it is fiction that largely anticipates reality into which the Covid-19 has plunged all humanity for many months. A reality where the fight against the virus began with a long confinement, this unbearable isolation that Pascal Rambert deals with in his play that looks like a fable, yet written two years ago.

“It is the first time that Pascal has written a text for a director, remarks Arthur Nauzyciel. Usually he writes to direct them himself or, once he has written his texts, others edit them. But he had been telling me for several years that he wanted to write me a text so that I could stage it.

I said OK and I promise to ride it. He left fromOrdet (The Words), that I created in 2008 and which had marked him a lot. He wanted to leave this universe or the memory he had of it. When he sent me this very beautiful text that he wrote for Pascal Greggory and Frédéric Pierrot, who played in The word, Marie-Sophie Ferdane and Adama Diop, I saw that I was in it too! “(Laughs)

“A slightly dark tale, a sort of ‘Goldilocks and the three bears’ trash”

He also remembers having liked it because it is a universe that we know little about the author, a text above ground, quite dreamlike:

“A kind of very dark ritual in which a lot of unconsciousness circulates, a lot of impulses, around sexuality, around the violence of men against the world, against nature, against animals, against women. And it’s a very masculine, lonely, quite wild universe. A somewhat dark tale, a kind of Goldilocks and the three bears trash. It’s both really intimate and very epic, with a mythological dimension since it is inspired by Shakespeare, the Greeks, with stories of devouring, cannibalism, where he really mixes sexuality, food, violence, nature… ”

Long gestation

The show was to be premiered last May at TNB in ​​Rennes, directed by Arthur Nauzyciel. The theaters closed, the director had to wait to rehearse and will finally create it at the Théâtre de La Colline in Paris. A long gestation conducive to exploring all the issues slipped by the author into a text, “Real gaming machine”, which differs from his other pieces by the importance given to the didascalies, these scenic indications which relate to the decoration, the accessories and the actions of the characters.