It’s every cyclist’s nightmare: seeing your life come to an abrupt end by being hit by a heavy weight. This is exactly what happened to Audrey Talbot on May 28, 2013.
From this tragic event that could have ended badly — “you were this close to dying,” one of the paramedics told her — the actress and author draws a documentary story to trace the thread of the events that allowed her to defy all logic. and survive (in 2016 the accident also served as inspiration for a song by Avec pas d’casque, Audrey is stronger than trucks). Around her, Francis Ducharme, Catherine Larochelle, Papy Maurice Mbwiti and Leni Parker embody the various participants in the drama (witnesses to the accident, emergency rescue, medical staff, family, friends, etc.).
Chronologically, Audrey Talbot reconstructs (by inventing or relying on her memories and her documentary research work) the 21 minutes which separate the accident from her arrival at the hospital, the various operations undergone, the process of physical rehabilitation and psychological and, finally, the learning of his new reality. Although warned by the actress at the start of the show, the public can hardly remain frozen in front of the descriptions of the body in tatters, which reminds us how much the survival of this woman is a miracle.
The first third of the show hits hard, thanks to the breathless story and the scenic device chosen by Philippe Cyr. Speaking to Audrey, seated with her back to the public, the paramedics, police and firefighters tell her what she cannot remember, making her the spectator of her own story. After this sequence, the text sometimes loses a little of its force: both the long process of rehabilitation and the reflections on resilience (a sort of obligatory passage for stories of survival or illness) stretch a little.
Philippe Cyr’s staging, sober and elegant, directs our gaze with small discreet touches, like when Audrey is left off stage during operations, a sign that she is still dispossessed of her body. Similarly, the suggestion rather than the demonstration during the scene of the character’s first shower after the accident shows the power of everyday gestures, the importance of which we forget before losing the possibility of performing them.
Cédric Delorme-Bouchard imagined an open stage space (a black tiled room, representing the different places occupied by Audrey Talbot throughout the medical process), but surrounded by a curtain serving to tighten the playing area when leaving the world medical, in order to reinforce the addresses to the public by the proximity between the stage and the room.
The show fascinates most of the time, because the author finds the right word and tone, as when it comes to living with the impacts of the accident, with her transformed body (and, above all, with the feeling of dispossession of it in the hands of the medical world), of the patient-caregiver relationship or even of the way people now look at it, in which the fascination for its resilience and its extraordinary history is not lacking, in the long term, to highlight its difference.
In a particularly revealing moment, the actress poses the terms of the paradox by opposing the miracle of her survival to an ardent desire “to be beige” and to disappear in the eyes of the world.. Titan Body (Survival Title) thus marks, for Audrey Talbot, the need to reclaim her life and her story to make peace with the duality between her two lives, the one before and the one after.