Between 1944 and 1959, the writer Albert Camus and the actress Maria Casarès wrote 865 passionate and exciting letters to each other, letters that were intimate and political, amorous and jealous, trivial and grandiose. From this extensive correspondence published by Gallimard in 2017, Dany Boudreault (adaptation) and Maxime Carbonneau (stage director) have developed a neat show, generally sober, a little long, but often moving. I’m writing to you in the middle of a beautiful storm is presented at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) after having known a first version on the occasion of the International Festival of Literature in 2021.
To give a backbone to the performance, and to ensure that the show frees itself a little from the restrictive framework of the letters exchanged, we imagined a television interview granted by Maria Casarès at the end of an exceptional existence. By answering the journalist’s questions, in particular about her “secret” affair with Camus, the actress brings up the past. The stage then becomes the meeting point of places and times. Classic, but impeccable, the space imagined by the director and his collaborators evokes both the television set, with its cameras and its images projected on long hanging tulles, but also the many hotel rooms, those where the lovers longed for each other before reconnecting passionately.
French history
Of course, from the Second World War to the war in Algeria, the political and intellectual history of France occupies an important place in the exchanges between the couple. While Casarès devotes herself to her flourishing career as an actress, Camus writes profusely plays, novels and essays, while opposing existentialism, Marxism and Soviet totalitarianism. Evoking her role model without imitating her, Anne Dorval is convincing, especially when the Casarès she embodies is in the prime of her life, that is to say the essence of the show. As for Steve Gagnon, he expresses Camus’s dilemmas well, particularly in marital matters, but above all he does credit to his eloquence. It is a sublime scene that alone is worth the detour. Casarès asks Camus to deliver the speech he is preparing for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The gaze immersed in the one he loves, the writer affirms: “Art is not in my eyes a solitary rejoicing. It is a means of moving the greatest number by offering a privileged image of common sufferings and joys. It therefore forces the artist not to isolate himself. “At the end of the speech, the actress declares:” I feel my heart melting when I think of the one who trembles a little, who hesitates, prays and shivers deep inside you, the one I often guess and who from time to time lets himself go ahead of me. What a party, young triumphant, what a party. »
Without ignoring philosophical concepts, the show focuses first and foremost on the humanity of the protagonists, on love and death, on the absence of the other and on the burn it causes. . “More pain has come to me from you than I ever expected from a human being,” wrote Camus. But with so much distress, your face remains for me that of happiness and life. I can’t help it, I didn’t do anything for it: I will love you until the end. »
If it includes very beautiful scenes, in particular those where the lovemaking of the couple is translated into pretty choreographies, it must be recognized that the 120-minute show stretches in length. The removal of a few redundant or melodramatic passages, such as the not very subtle representation of the car accident, would change the whole, allowing this show full of qualities to take off.