Royan, the french teachercreated at the Festival d’Avignon in 2021 and six performances of which are offered at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (this Montreal stopover, first scheduled for 2022, having been postponed), was first born from the desire of an actress and a a director, Nicole Garcia and Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, to work together on a solo show.
Mother and son had a few authors in mind, from whom they planned to commission a work, including, at the top of the list, Marie NDiaye, who made them happy to accept. “She is a great writer, whom I love to read. I like what she suggests in her books, the stories she accompanies, the characters she offers. We recognize Marie NDiaye when we start to read something about her”, launches, enthusiastic, the one who has played, since her beginnings in the mid-1960s, in several dozen films, among which are Boy by Claude Sautet Little Lily by Claude Miller as well as the recent A nice morning by Mia Hansen-Løve, in addition to having directed nine feature films herself, including lovers And A lot of stones.
Bélier-Garcia, who has also co-scripted certain films by Nicole Garcia, has already staged several texts by NDiaye, including his first play, hildaThen Honor to our elected. This enthusiasm that the duo has nurtured over the years for the pen of the French playwright and novelist was therefore enough for him to give her carte blanche. “We met once and we talked, not a lot. “The time that the actress launches three words to the author, which she could be inspired by: loneliness, betrayal and memory.
It must be said that the writer, winner of the Goncourt prize for Three powerful women and the Femina prize for Rosie Carp, has a job. And many of her works, literary and theatrical, deal with complex themes, such as the weight of motherhood, social diktats, ostracism and the pangs of guilt. Royan, the French teacher dig this register. Gabrielle, born in Oran (like her interpreter), where she enjoyed blissful freedom, felt the need to reinvent herself when she and her mother moved to France. “At the Marseille high school, where I landed at 17, I did not present myself as I was or as I dreamed of being, but as I had to be to be estimated”, quotes , imbued with the eloquent character of this line, the one who utters it on stage. The protagonist will study, marry and give birth, but the burden of family and marital obligations will get the better of her, and the French teacher will go into exile, alone, in Royan.
It’s like with anyone who’s just been arrested. We start by saying: you’re wrong, it’s not me, I didn’t do anything. Then, little by little, it will be necessary to face the facts and that she accepts what she has done.
At the heart of this solitary and smooth existence, she will one day be confronted with Daniella, a student who dares to flout the norms governing the appearance and behavior of women, but whose classmates cruelly make her pay the price. This victim of bullying will send signals of distress to her teacher, who will make the fatal choice to ignore them so as not to compromise her own peace of mind. “It’s a very unstable balance that she has built for herself, it is fragile,” explains Garcia, before adding: “She has built herself a little rail and she knows that she must not so. Otherwise, she puts herself in danger, she risks falling into what she calls her madness. She knows that she has a singularity of character”, she is aware of “everything she must constrain in her” to appear as “a qualified teacher, an esteemed colleague, and she protects herself, she puts herself on guard. crazy everywhere”.
But Daniella shakes Gabrielle’s barriers, convinced that her student senses the sense of inadequacy that boils inside her and threatens to derail her at any moment. “That’s why she couldn’t help someone she had to help. »
offense of inaction
This monologue by Gabrielle, delivered on the landing of a floor below that where her apartment is located, to avoid facing Daniella’s parents who are waiting for her at her door, is therefore an exploration of the path leading from the disempowerment to an admission of guilt: “It’s like with any person who has just been arrested. We start by saying: you’re wrong, it’s not me, I didn’t do anything. Then, little by little, it will be necessary to face the facts and that she accepts what she has done. The hand she didn’t reach out.
NDiaye’s dense writing is sometimes raw, sometimes allegorical, even concealing a certain amount of ambiguity, which the actress says she “embraced” during the creation of the show. All the same, when the meaning of certain passages persisted in evading her, Frédéric Bélier-Garcia was able to prove to be “a very good guide”.
The intimate bond that unites the two artists thus seems marked not only by complicity, but by esteem. “Honestly, I find that Frédéric is a very good director. I like his way of analyzing the texts, of seeing what’s behind, the contradiction that hides in a sentence. That’s what feeds the game, we scratch the score more thanks to all the possibilities it [fait émerger]. He likes to highlight the ambivalence of feelings, a word of love that you can’t say – where others would hear something else – when you don’t want to reveal yourself. All those things in our life that are contradictory. Anything that is alive. »