Twelve years after health problems prevented him from presenting Pain at the TNM and the CNA, Dominique Blanc is finally in Quebec, on the stage of Usine C, to defend with unusual conviction a moving war story. Based on the text by Marguerite Duras, published in 1985 by POL editions, Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang gave birth in 2008 to a 70-minute show as spare as it is careful, tragic without being devoid of lightness, in which an actress shines exceptional, whose emotional and technical accuracy commands admiration.
In June 1944, Marguerite Duras’s husband, the poet and resistance fighter Robert Antelme, was deported to a concentration camp. In her diary, the writer records waiting, anguish, sometimes even despair, but also courage, mutual aid, solidarity. In April 1945, thanks in particular to François Mitterrand, then Secretary General of Refugees, Prisoners and Deportees, Antelme managed to escape from Dachau and return home, narrowly escaping death. In the pages of Pain, Duras revisits these events. In what she calls “a phenomenal disorder of thought and feeling”, she interweaves autobiography and invention in order to translate reality with prodigious acuity.
Since pain “needs space”, it was only natural that we give it the stage. In an empty space, apart from a desk and a few chairs, the actress is already there, her back, as the public enters. As soon as she breaks the silence, we are hung on her lips. All his gestures, large and small, arouse fascination. Whether she manipulates notebooks and pencils, peels an apple, paces around the stage or leans delicately on the wall at the back of the stage, each movement seems significant, supported by the words without necessarily repeating them.
In Gilles Bottachi’s lighting, essential to the show, Dominique Blanc is Marguerite, an irresistible evocation of Duras, a woman who is both thirty and seventy-year-old, paralyzed by distress and the next moment capable of a step of retreat. To say that the actress has the intelligence of the text is an understatement. In his body, in his voice, the score is not only clear, it appears in all its nuances, allowing laughter to emerge among the tears, earthiness in the heart of darkness.
“There is only suffering everywhere, bleeding and screams, this is why thought is prevented from happening, it does not participate in the chaos but is constantly supplanted by this chaos, without means, in the face of it. » In this story of the Second World War, entire pages are addressed to us, here and now. It is impossible not to recognize in what atrocious way history repeats itself over and over again. “The only response to this crime is to make it a crime for all. To share it. As well as the idea of equality, of fraternity. To support it, to tolerate the idea of it, to share the crime. »