Posted on February 13
I believe that there are very few actors who have never asked themselves before going on stage: “But what am I doing here? or, to put it in more classic terms: What was he going to do in this mess? Backstage, I hear the echoes of the city: a delivery truck backs into the alley behind the theater; white-collar workers come out of the office talking about the past day; the siren of an ambulance tears the fabric of dawning evening. And me… ? I am there, in a torn Beckettian beggar’s costume, or suspended from the ceiling of the room, dressed as a pterodactyl; or even in the livery of a Shakespearian madman. But what am I doing there, in this dark backstage, while the world outside seems to be continuing on its merry way, well anchored to its useful objectives?
A huge doubt will always hang over us, because the theater is an eminently suspect activity. Talk to the comedian disguised as a pterodactyl and hanging from the ceiling. An activity that flirts with the useless… It should not claim a decisive contribution to the GDP or to whatever index we would like to apply to it.
All this attempt at accounting rehabilitation that surrounds this fragile art, which aims to adorn it with statistics such as those of restaurant visits or the sale of spare tires, lamentably misses the heart of the matter.
We do theater precisely because it’s useless.
I don’t care a bit about pedagogical virtues (although there are some!) like positive balance sheets. What interests me is the possibility of play, this idea that one can, very seriously, in a methodical, organised, deliberate way… reconnect with play. That of childhood. That of art. This coming and going that is the game, a game that we take to heart: the spectator and the actor constantly exchange signs to measure whether the game is taken seriously. It happens imperceptibly, or with loud bursts of laughter, or muffled sighs.
Yes, it’s a serious game: the ordinary goals of life are suspended for the duration of the performance, but other goals soon impose themselves: it’s a matter of believing in them and getting lost in them. What is particular to the theater is that it is the spectator who becomes the first player.
If, as an actor, I end up absorbing myself in the game, by sinking into the fiction that unfolds on stage, I win my bet only when it becomes effortless, when it really becomes a game. A fluid game, if I feel that the spectators get lost with me; a game that struggles to find its bearings if I don’t feel the room breathing with me.
Representation is a game that puts on a show, that has its own goals, its own conventions. But that doesn’t mean she’s cut off from the world. On the contrary ! this game is anything but innocent, it plunges into the heart of my existence: it often happened to me on stage to suddenly feel that me and the spectator were in the process of “creating” together a word parallel to the text of the play. A word that says: we all play roles, we are all characters, life itself is a stage, and the theater performance is the confession… In other words, life is a more or less well regulated performance. , it is a deceptive illusion to think that there is a separation between reality and representation.
The theater says: are we not, always, already, in performance?
The goal of this strange game: to make our flesh feel that we all play roles that have been assigned to us according to rules and conventions that largely escape us.
Perhaps the trembling of opening nights that grips theater actors and actresses, beyond the desire to do well, to adequately reflect the work of rehearsal… is a vertigo before the naked game ; I mean, during the hour of performance, it is affirmed that life, like performance, is a game. . His double who has his eyes riveted to the stars which shine in vain…
And the spectator who believes himself to be unique, so authentic in the pursuit of his goals, of his personal accomplishment, is presented with the possibility that he may himself be a character in this great comedy… And when the play plays well their cards, the spectator can then go out into the open air and ask themselves: “Who is my director? Why was I given this role? I don’t remember having learned all these lines… What is the title of this room in which I have lived for so long? »