They loved each other with a deep love, resisting the absences, the impediments, the marriage of one, the disappointments of the other. They loved each other through letters, abundant and intense missives, which, at the time, flew, on paper, towards the loved one, filling their eclipse with words, both of which were also in love.
The correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès was intended to remain secret. When Camus died, it was handed over discreetly to René Char, who eventually handed it over to Maria Casarès, who, it is said, sold it to Catherine Camus. It was only after the death of Camus and Casarès, and after that of Albert Camus’ legitimate wife, Francine Faure, that their daughter, Catherine Camus, decided to have them published by Gallimard in 2017. .
These letters, Dany Boudreault, a lover of correspondence, devoured them, in the solitude of the confinement of the pandemic. He brought it out of the theatre, the play I’m writing to you in the middle of a beautiful storm, directed by Maxime Carbonneau, with Anne Dorval as Maria Casarès and Steve Gagnon as Albert Camus. The play opens at the TNM on Tuesday.
Eroticism in words
“We are leaving the letters,” says Dany Boudreault, adding that 40% of the show is made up of excerpts from interviews and plays, and even the speech receiving the Nobel Prize by Albert Camus in 1957. On stage, the bodies will come closer, will touch, embodying the eroticism that the two icons have been able to express so well in words. “Camus makes love by writing,” says Steve Gagnon. “He is attracted by his intelligence, his ardor, his passion and his anger. Casarès, for his part, “wants to please” Albert Camus, recalls Anne Dorval. And it is to please him that she, who is Spanish, will take care of the French of her letters.
It was towards the end of the war, in 1944, that Albert Camus and Maria Casarès met at Michel Leiris. But Casarès, embarrassed by the fact that Camus was married, will move away from him for four years, before finding him, by chance, in the streets of Paris. A passionate, often epistolary relationship will follow, which will last until January 4, 1960 when Camus is killed in a car accident. He had then made the decision to leave his wife, and asked Casarès to join him in Paris. “Last letter. Just to tell you that I’m coming,” he wrote to her on December 30, 1959, five days before he died.
I’m writing to you in the middle of a beautiful storm begins with an interview given by Maria Casarès at the end of her life, when she reveals the affair she had with Albert Camus. A series of flashbacks, through which this passionate relationship is embodied, through different eras, from the French Resistance to the Algerian war and existentialism. “The interview is a portal” to different times, says Dany Boudreault. To stage this play, he had to choose from among the 865 missives that Casarès and Camus exchanged during their lifetime.
Playing Albert Camus on stage could have been a daunting gamble for Steve Gagnon. But it is undoubtedly the authenticity revealed by the writer in his letters which made the task easier for him. Rather than a monument, he embodies a man, with his passions, his doubts, his clumsiness and his disarray, the tuberculosis which also gnaws at him.
The quest for new experiences
Anne Dorval, for whom this is a return to the hot stage of the theatre, sees her opposite in Maria Casarès. “I saw a video in which she says that she no longer wants to do cinema”, says the one who, for her part, has not played in the theater for more than a decade. Casarès, however, was illustrated on the big screen, especially in The children of paradiseand Orpheus.
Each on their own, the lovers live intensely and travel a lot. They admire each other for this professional life which feeds them and distances them at the same time. Dany Boudreault says he liked, through the exchanges he chose, being able to show the other side of the work of an artist and a writer, the pressing deadlines, the doubts, the risks to be taken. While Albert Camus reached the zenith with the 1957 Nobel Prize, Maria Casarès was at its peak when she played at the Comédie-Française, and with the Théâtre national populaire.
“But she’s a woman who constantly takes risks,” says Anne Dorval. Always looking for new experiences, always unsatisfied. While she would have been 100 years old last November, Casarès, who played Marie Tudor in Montreal in her time, has not finished talking about her.