If you were given the choice between continuing your current life or reinventing everything, what would you do? With the pandemic, the question has never been so topical. In his comedy “The World After”, the author and director Guillaume Roper-Sirvent asks with humor and irreverence the question of life choices, the scope of possibilities and the use of our time on earth.
In 2020, when the world was idling, Guillaume Roper-Sirvent felt titillated by the speeches of people promising themselves a radical change of life at the end of the tunnel: “I was skeptical of this idea of “world after” in which everything would be different. I wondered a lot if, confronted if we chose to change everything, we would actually change so many things. » So he wrote a comedy that scratches the fantasy of dropping everything to raise goats in the Larzac. “The World After” puts the viewer face to face with his pettiness and contradictions, but above all with his relationship to the present moment.
Jaoui-style writing
The text is as funny as it is relevant and current. It addresses the question of happiness, and even mental health through the subject of indecision, the fear of living one’s life badly or the fear of changing it. The nine characters whose hypocrisies and anxieties we take turns stripping to touch humanity are endearing and colorful. Family disputes steeped in both love and unsaid recall the plays of Agnès Jaoui and Jean Pierre Bacri. In his inspirations, the author also cites Yasmina Reza for her sarcasm in the face of human relations, as much as the series Ten percent of which he adores the character of Laure Calamy: “I like quirky and slightly crazy characters”.
As for laughing at our existential anguish, Guillaume Roper-Sirvent is attached to the words of Pierre Desproges who make humor the “politeness of despair”. He finds that many people are still on the brink of burnout and adds, mischievously: “It’s tragic, but it can also be very funny.”
Une production made in French New York
The play is presented by The New York Theater Workshop, a French association of amateur theater which, since 2014, brings together French-speaking expatriates attracted by the game, the boards and the camaraderie. The Atelier, whose courses Guillaume Roper-Sirvent leads alongside its founder Laura Lassy-Townsend and Remy Souchon, produces one piece each year. Adaptation of Molière, Marivaud, Chekhov, Jaoui and Bacri or original text like “Le Monde d’Après”: it’s good to hear the French language on a New York stage.
“It takes a dose of nerve for a company of amateurs to produce and perform a play in French, in New York, and which surprises by its quality”, smiles Guillaume Roper-Sirvent. In addition to the nerve, it is above all the experience and rigor of the directors as well as the talent and hard work of the actors, which ensures the success of the plays of L’Atelier each year. For amateur theatre, it makes all the difference between a level of school fair and what Le Monde d’Après offers: a beautiful production that promises a moment of laughter and reflection to the spectator.
« The World After », an original comedy written and directed by Guillaume Roper-Sirvent and produced by L’Atelier Théâtre NY. With Julie Abbas, Benjamin Auzimour, Nicolas Becquet, Fiona Dalmier, Marion Hérouard, Cécile Lopez-Mora, Benjamin Nadal, Claire Obry, Anne Urbain.
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