There are more and more, it seems, autofictional shows in the theatre. La Licorne, in particular, has welcomed a few in recent years, between Of your strength to liveby Marie-Eve Perron, and Mythology, by Sarianne Cormier. In the solo The title of the book would be Corinne, Annie Darisse evokes a personal tragedy: the death of her older sister and her niece in a car accident in 2014. From conversations with the actress, the playwright Marie-Christine Lê-Huu wrote a “biographical fiction”. And she undeniably made theater out of it.
On stage, Annie Darisse puts this story at a distance by using the third person and a vein of self-mockery. Recounting what the protagonist has experienced, the text treats her as a character on whom is cast a retrospective gaze devoid of complacency. In the little show directed by none other than Claude Poissant, the projection of sentences on the set by Simon Guilbault also creates a plot parallel to the monologue, which forces questions to be called into question, asks the character questions, reveals what he dares not say, even contradicts him.
Lê-Huu’s text is very well written, elegantly and intelligently. The downside is that it also keeps emotion at bay. But beyond the personal drama, modestly evoked, the play explores a rich theme: the rigid boundaries of classes, social ascent – and the feeling of guilt aroused by an extraction from one’s original environment. Here, a family from Rivière-du-Loup whose protagonist had moved away a little. She had worked hard to extricate herself from her lineage, to cultivate herself in order to spawn in intellectual circles and thus escape the destiny transmitted from mother to daughter. It’s a bit like what Annie Ernaux — the play incidentally alludes to the Nobel-winning writer — described in The placea story about his worker father: “the heritage that I had to leave on the threshold of the bourgeois and cultivated world when I entered it”.
In certain scenes of the show, the protagonist seems to mock this ambition, imagining herself, in strongly self-deprecating segments, talking about the worldwide success of a novel trilogy that she would have written on her drama, in the talk show by Ellen DeGeneres…
On a more collective level, she soberly observes that “all lives do not have the same weight”. This strong image emerges from the story: the two victims, mother and daughter, were “not equals in death”, depending on the means of the family, who took charge of the funeral expenses.
A solo that Annie Darisse carries throughout with dignity, presence and a lot of mastery, taking us with ease between derision and reflection.