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Lisa Pajon and Hédi Tillette from Clermont-Tonnerre return to us five years later Two Brothers and the lions (favorite 2015 of the press club at the Festival d’Avignon). Their new piece is joyful at the same time as it is delicate and harsh.
Lisa Pajon and Hédi Tillette from Clermont-Tonnerre are first of all intelligent and sensitive. There is something that makes you think of Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina in this endearing, radiant and creative couple of artists.
Hédi Tillette from Clermont-Tonnerre is a wonderful playwright. He wanted here to try to understand and therefore to explain to us what happened to his father in August 1943 when he left for the compulsory labor service, the STO, and especially why his father never spoke about it. What happened to this 20-year-old man in 1943 who is studying law rather brilliantly, who falls in love for the first time, who is passionate about adventure novels and who is suddenly torn from his daily life and who, his return in 1945, stops his law studies, discovers a hatred for his first love and finds himself unable to open any book.
The play is an act of love by a son for a father who did not know how to disobey his father.
This 22-year-old man will understand that, in the name of an authority that overlooks us, a father has conceded to sacrifice his son. Unlike Abraham’s son, he was not saved at the last second by divine intervention. His father handed him over to the gendarmes to go and work for the Nazi war effort. The play is paradoxically a play about a son’s love for his father. In this it already upsets us. In this she knows how to be joyful, optimistic, lively. It is also a play about a man’s silence, about sadness, about sacrifice, about death and about hatred. Hédi Tillette from Clermont-Tonnerre is simply irresistible; it takes us with laughter, smiles of joy, pangs in the heart of worry, vain hopes and tears, hot tears that assail us before the harsh spectacle of a terrible father-son relationship, of an oedipal love broken by a superego from elsewhere, imported by religion, patriotic morality and the apology of military obedience. Here is the succulent aporia of this story: a father must teach his son to disobey, in order to obey him justly. This is his first job and his dignity.
The staging follows the line of confession. We are seized by the actor who catches us accomplices in his life, in his confidences, in his dreams, his nightmares. And Lisa Pajon is terrific. Along the way, we are invited into the very midst of inextinguishable psychic pain, of a trauma of war that hides another: the inconsolable one of disappointment in the Father.
Once again Hédi Tillette from Clermont-Tonnerre will have used his science of storytelling, his art of acting and his good looks as an actor to make us live an unforgettable and moving slice of life.
Not to be missed, the piece is one of the pearls of the festival.
All the articles of the editorial staff in Avignon can be found here.
At the table, at home, we did not speak., by Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre and Lisa Pajon, Les Halles, from July 10 to 26 – closed on July 13, 20 at 11:30 a.m. Duration: 55min.
Photo credit: Baptiste Muzard.
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