Among the Greeks, she was the goddess of revenge, bringing down her wrath on humans guilty of hubris, in other words of excess. Némésis gives its name to the last novel by Philip Roth (1933-2018), signed by the American writer in 2010. A master novel, hiding under the limpidity of its surface a rich and complex polysemy, powerful groundswells . And in particular this one, which resonates with as much force as trouble today: what an epidemic reveals and fractures in a society.
The young author and director Tiphaine Raffier, who for the first time is producing a text that is not by her pen, nevertheless avoided pulling on this string too easily, and it is to her credit. She strives to restore the complexity of the novel, which Roth places in the Jewish quarter of Newark, his hometown. It was the summer of 1944, a scorching summer, when the sun and the heat weighed down like a leaden screed. America is at war on two fronts. Bucky Cantor is a young and vigorous gym teacher, but he was discharged, because of his failing eyesight.
Bucky is consumed by the shame of not being on the front line with others, when a faceless evil descends on his small town apart from history: polio. The epidemic is spreading at lightning speed and is particularly affecting young people. It is also a war, which provokes the same impotent stupor as the other, in which millions of Jews are exterminated. And it leads to the fall of Bucky Cantor, a healthy, honest and straight boy, in the image of America as it dreams. But such as it is perhaps not: Bucky is a variation of Oedipus, who provokes tragedy by everything he does to escape it. He also has something of Ivan in The Karamazov Brothersby Dostoyevsky: an indignation without effect, which misses its point.
Polysemic richness
Such a novel is a challenge for the theater, insofar as its polysemous richness is played out in the folds of the narration, without demonstration or explanation. And Tiphaine Raffier’s show remains on the surface, very flat, like the large canvas deployed in the stage space in the second part, on which is printed a superb lake and mountain landscape. His mastery of the stage is undeniable, there is no shortage of staging ideas, especially in this second part, performed as a musical (with little singers from the Children’s Choir of the Saint-Denis Conservatory), as if to play better with the deceiving paradises of America.
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