On the stage of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM), Gabrielle, a high school teacher faced with the suicide of a student who was harassed, is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s cruel Lady Macbeth. In her bouts of somnambulism, this Machiavellian Queen of Scotland frantically washed her hands without succeeding in erasing the bloodstains, so remorse persisted in tormenting her at night.
Thus the same tragedy is relived in Royan. The French teacher, a solo show by French actress Nicole Garcia presented in Montreal after a tour in her country. The eternal badly managed guilt, heightened in our age allergic to its bad conscience, squirms on the boards, no longer knowing on which foot to dance. Marie NDiaye, encouraged for Three powerful women, wrote this great text with a scalpel from the end of his intimate laser. Make you want to read it at Gallimard editions to better penetrate its nuances. Work on the banality of evil with a sharp clairvoyance. Female portrait in corseted path of suffering. Not only. Landscape of an air of time too. Leaving the theater, it takes a long time to meditate on all the issues.
How could Gabrielle face the despair of the parents of the young dead girl waiting for revelations at the top of the stairs of her building? How to look in the mirror? By what inner pirouettes do people justify their most despicable acts? This burning monologue is a dive into the heart of the unmentionable, where only the brave or those who have little choice but to confront each other venture.
The teenager who was defenestrated at school haunts the heart and mind of this woman who neither knew nor wanted to counter the irreparable. The personal ghosts, the rigid proprieties of this literature teacher, to whom reading has hardly taught humanity, screened her sensitivity. It is up to her to use the past to regain her footing in this world.
This text is the self-analysis of an ordinary monster, locked in its shell, who once wanted to see his mother die, who abandoned husband and child, who refused to answer the letters of the young pupil in distress, without alerting the direction of the high school when the overly sensitive student screamed his pain.
Crime of cowardice, crime of egocentrism, crime of a teacher herself flouted by her class, crime of a woman hostage to her image, unable to support this student without beauty or primers even after having perceived her light. Yesterday, the girl’s Medusa hair looked like menacing serpents hurled in her direction. Today remains to survive after having collected his last words…
She had not set foot in the theater for a long time, the filmmaker of The adversary and of Place Vendômethe actress of Let the festivities begin and of Peril in the house. But Marie NDiaye wrote this piece just for her, and will refuse. The teacher and her interpreter were born in Oran, French Algeria. Both took care of their femininity like a shield against the world. Fiction does the rest. It was Nicole Garcia’s own son, Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, who staged the monologue, very soberly, leaving room for many words and rare gestures. At the premiere at the TNM, the actress had coughing problems and her voice did not always carry far, but each intonation pushed her breath towards a path of truth.
Royan is the name of the town where the drama takes place in the play. It could be anywhere. In Quebec too. So many disasters occur in schools, those troubled environments that also give birth to evil beasts. Stories of violent students attacking their teachers or a Turk’s head driven to suicide are relayed in many news bulletins. There is also talk of school administrators whose eyes have long been closed in the face of the torments of the victims. These hit a wall when mistreatment in class or in the playground turns into tragedy. The leading heads would have seen nothing, heard nothing. Hum! Further investigations will confirm it: they knew, of course. A whole dynamic of fear, silence or indifference was set in motion to camouflage the defects of the group and the shortcomings of the individuals.
The artistic value of Royan… rests above all on its hard-hitting authenticity. This monologue disturbs us because it brilliantly addresses the individualism of our societies, the perversity of unfettered child kings, the irresponsibility of adults and the lack of ethics at school as everywhere. Air known to broken youth. Many films, many plays and many books deal with these sensitive subjects. And so much the better if works strive to repeat to us that Lady Macbeth is us too…