Swiss director François Gremaud returns to Quebec with Phaedra!a show for a single actor, which revisits Racine’s classic in a mode of irreverence — but just as much esteem.
Instead of the masterpiece of classical French theatre, the Carrefour international de théâtre will instead host a contemporary comedy for solo actor. The tragedy in five acts inspired by Greek mythology, with its 1654 alexandrines, gives way to the passion of a single lecturer for the text of the XVIIe century — the exclamation mark proposed by the title, then, was called “point of admiration”.
The proposal, it must be said, comes from a commission intended for Swiss high school students; a way of approaching this young audience with an “eminently joyful” message: “By respecting what Racine’s language, the alexandrine and all these complex things have been in history, do we find a way to make it accessible and interesting today? »
Such a choice of staging may seem strange on the part of a man of the theater who had promised himself never to stage a classic text, he who studied in institutions that were at least steeped in French theatre: “ Because there isn’t really a “Swiss theatre”. And it’s true that, in French-speaking Switzerland, we are very influenced by France — even if, now, that has changed a little. »
The show had a wonderful reception from the public, responding completely to the humor that I defend in my work.
” Phaedrus, we actually study it at school”, continues the man who, in his own training, felt the need to defend a less conventional approach. “It’s a kind of obligatory passage. When we approach the question of theatre, we do so from its literary angle, and we approach either Corneille, Racine or Molière. There is this kind of stranglehold of French authors on literature and theater at school. »
Interested in particular in writing for the set, Gremaud quickly felt the need to distance himself from his beginnings in the profession, some twenty years ago: the need to get rid of “this incredible weight in a certain way to do”, which will serve here as his “irreverent” rereading of Phaedra.
Europe, America
These considerations on the weight of the Racinian corpus being, will remain to know if Quebec will offer to the irreverence of this Phaedra! its best breeding ground, if Racine’s text and the idea of the theater it can convey will find the same echoes here. We can certainly recall a staging by Olivier Reichenbach at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 1988 or the more recent version by Martin Genest at La Bordée in 2007; it remains that Racine, a name all the same unavoidable, imposes itself little on our boards – hence the danger, therefore, of a certain loss in the crossing of the Atlantic?
” It is true that Phaedra!, it’s a kind of snub to a certain idea of theater, which, indeed, in Quebec, is no longer the same”, admits the director who, attracted by the theater here, already had one took advantage in his formative years to make a passage through the National School. “It is certain that Quebec theater freed itself from French theater long before the Swiss and the Belgians — who, twenty years ago, also took part in this movement. »
The soil is nonetheless fertile. The humor and irreverence at the foundation of Gremaud’s writing should hit the bull’s eye, if we are to believe the contact to which his precedent led conferences of things, in 2017 at the Festival TransAmériques: “The show had a wonderful reception from the public, responding perfectly to the humor that I defend in my work. »
The game before the text
To hear Gremaud enthused about Phaedrus and the richness of his language, considering also the form of the solo favored by his writing, one is almost surprised that he did not dream of performing this show himself, which sticks to his own words. From the start, however, the direction of the game was clear: “I would never have written this show if Romain [Daroles] refused to play it. »
“It’s sewn on him”, adds the director who defends a theater where the performers take precedence over the text. This show is part of the broader framework of a trilogy dedicated to the “great female figures of the classical living arts that are Phaedrus for the theatre, Gisele for ballet and Carmen for the opera”: a way of redoing the classes he did not want to do for twenty years.
In quotation marks, he will present this Phaedra! as a “pretext” to spend two hours with an exceptional actor, a “solar” actor. ” [Romain Daroles] arouses gigantic sympathy as soon as he arrives on stage. He has a way of managing his body and reinventing the language every night, a way of bringing the text back into play every day…”
Daroles, moreover, comes from the south of France – accent absolutely “relevant” to defend Racine: “The magic of the theater passes nevertheless by formidable interpreters, concludes Gremaud. That’s kind of what I wanted to say, to the high school students first of all, for whom the show was imagined: that theater also involves bodies, and bodies… generous, exciting — There. »