“Colossal” project involving a dozen pens from the French-speaking world, If you want light germinated for six years. A long creative process that will have served the show that will be created at Prospero, before starting a European tour, according to the designer of the adventure. Florent Siaud has long wanted to stage an adaptation of the myth of Faust. He sees in Goethe’s work of 1808 themes “glaringly contemporaneous: the question of consent, the subject of science, with its limits, its crisis, climatic collapse, the notion of a perfect virtual being who would come replace the human.
For the director, “how to find light and life in a world which is closing in on itself and which is increasingly afraid of death” is the big question that runs through Faust. And over the years, the play, which begins in the medical world, continues in a California ravaged by fires, then on an island threatened by rising waters, seems to have acquired even more resonance. “It became dizzying, because at the beginning, we said to ourselves: there is a strange game of mirrors between Goethe’s subjects and our time. And since 2020, there has been an acceleration of crises. It’s as if in the end, the themes we had the intuition to explore six years ago became more and more contemporary and projected us into an anticipation that we hadn’t foreseen. »
Thus, the new conversational robots we are talking about lately echo the virtual avatar present in the second act, which questions the relationship of human beings with artificial intelligences and the way of experiencing mourning. “This is the first time that I have tackled questions close to the very present, even to the future. And I’m not going to treat this in a science fiction way. For me, this is the eternal question of theatre: how, with foreigners, whether they come from countries, families – as Romeo and Juliet — or of different entities, is there love, interaction, possible understanding, or not? Finally, this is the question posed by our time: how to coexist with what is no longer “us” altogether? Where are we going to be in this new digital configuration, where the terrestrial is less and less present? »
The life cycle
In If you want light, Faust is an oncologist who, having fallen in love with a patient (played by Sophie Cadieux), will try at all costs to save her through science. But Margot, a botanist, rather cultivates a vision where “death is not only an end, but the breeding ground for what is to follow”. “This is what we see in forests: mushrooms thrive on humus, so we need body decomposition for the rest to happen, illustrates Florent Siaud. It’s a very vegetal vision, nourished by a conception of nature that sees the beginning all over again. A kind of infinite cycle. Where Faust, perhaps out of therapeutic relentlessness, out of love, but also because of a [ego] too closed, sees in death an individual tragedy, Margot tries to widen the question to a much more cosmic notion. It places the human in a history of species, of cycles. »
Co-produced with numerous institutions, the piece has been the subject of residencies in several countries, in particular with specialists from the health and technology sectors. “For example, says Siaud, we did six different residencies for the first part, with the hospital environment, oncologists, nurses, caregivers, biologists, in order to have the appropriate gestures, the ethical questions on the therapeutic support. “These professionals have also created new scenes, “by revealing themes or characters that we had not necessarily approached”.
For the director, these discussions were fundamental. “They told us how the pandemic had changed the relationship of patients to care, that there was a greater awareness of [vouloir] replacing chemistry with a more holistic approach to the body and how to end one’s life. These are themes that run through the play. And finally, the question of the human quality of the therapeutic relationship developed a lot thanks to their feedback. »
Polyphony
From the outset, Florent Siaud wanted to translate the polyphony present in Goethe through a great diversity of contemporary voices. He embarked on the discovery of contemporary playwrights, even reading plays not yet published, to fix his choice on 12 authors (in addition to himself), from various places: Madagascar, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lebanon, Benin, Haiti, Quebec.
The creator, who uses a lot of plant images during the interview, compares this range of writing to a garden of voices. “For six years, everything grew in a very patient slowness. Émilie Monnet, for example, has been involved in the project since 2017. We meet, we exchange versions. She makes me read a lot of books, makes me see exhibitions. Me, I tell him what the other texts become, and that creates a permanent back and forth, which is of the order of pollination. Because it causes particles to germinate, circulate, which nourish me, jostle me and which, at the same time, will contaminate the other parts. In the writings which interact with each other, which listen to each other, allow each other to be inspired, we discover a very particular resonance. It’s not just an addition of voices. It’s a journey of voices that have changed each other, while being deeply themselves. »
Despite the cultural differences of the authors, “by dint of reading the versions of each other, it is as if, finally, a common imagination was mysteriously constituted. We open up possibilities. No ideology or message is assigned. The spectator is offered to experience several visions of death, of dreams. » Each author, responsible for an episode, has his own style. The piece crosses “naturalism, poetry, mysticism, the supernatural… a myriad of ways of naming the real”.
Two characters run through this entire three-hour pluralistic epic. It was Francis Ducharme, whom Siaud had directed in Britannicus at the TNM, which embodies Faust. “I wanted to offer him a very powerful philosophical and human experience,” says the designer. That it leaves the depression to go towards the zones of light. I haven’t seen him in overwhelming roles like that, where he has to go through human pain that will make him tap into his most intimate resources — which are endless. »
The director entrusted Méphisto, who became an actor in the adaptation, to the Frenchman Yacine Sif El Islam, for whom he had a crush. “He has a way of always improvising which is very close to this unpredictable character, in the continual invention of what he could propose to Faust. Yacine has a fanciful way of renewing the character of the devil from scene to scene, to which he gives a very human relief, a great depth. And I realized that the more we work, the less we are in an antagonistic couple. We are in a twin relationship. Both [acteurs] have such chemistry that they manage to have a brotherly relationship. I find that it speaks ambiguously of our relationship with our values, with what we are, what we think we are. We can identify with the two poles in a much more complex way. »
Also with Dominique Quesnel, Jasmine Bouziani and Madani Tall, Florent Siaud underlines the “intercultural dialogue” in distribution, but also among designers. Counting the many residences, “it’s really a project that breathes polyphony. I believe that polyphony is a possible response to the compartmentalization that threatens, to the loneliness that we can experience in our post-pandemic era. »