A disused movie theater. Outdated armchairs whose worn velvet has lost its luster. Grandma Kiki, Marie-Do, Roger, Jacques, Claudie, Christophe and Father Puig, everyone is there. In his latest show, Christophe Honoré stages himself and invites his mother, his grandparents, two uncles and an aunt to his side. Seven destinies crossed over three generations that trace the history of his maternal family.
The play opens with the shooting of an “imaginary” film that Christophe – played by Youssouf Abi-Ayad – has undertaken to make. A family fresco never completed which starts in Nantes under the bombs. Halfway through the Second World War, Odette, a war widow and already a mother of two children – the masterful Marlène Saldana – meets the one who will become her second husband: the seductive Domenico Puig. They will have eight children together who will grow up between disputes and football matches in the HLM of the Grand Clos housing estate.
The destinies of children and grandchildren intersect around this female figure, Grandma Kiki, who was, in her own words, a “kid making machine” and “the most cuckolded and beaten woman in Nantes”.
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How to tell this family heritage without betraying those concerned? How to make this intimacy a theatrical material? Throughout the play, Christophe, the filmmaker’s grandson, questions himself and lets the characters comment on or challenge the way the screenplay portrays them. The seven actors, both members of the family and interpreters of this imaginary film, deliver in turn their truth about this common history with a lot of humor and sincerity.
Chiara Mastroianni, for whom this is her first experience on stage, delicately embodies a fragile and depressed Claudie who tries several times to put an end to these days.
Alcohol, drugs, difficult ends of the month, madness, betrayals and omnipresent death: the family story constantly navigates between lightness and brutality, without any taboos. We dance with delight and relief to a hit by Sheila. We tremble under the blows of this alcoholic father distraught by his drug addict son.
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The strength of the piece is to touch the complexity of the characters as closely as possible. The darling grandmother who a few months before her death will deny her grandson by discovering his homosexuality. The grandfather, fickle and violent husband rejected by the family, to whom the children write in secret. Violence and tenderness mixed.
True to form, Christophe Honoré mixes genres and invites video on stage on several occasions. Thunderous intervention by Father Puig on the television set, excerpts from the cast of this unfinished film or out-of-camera sequences filmed in the backstage toilets, the back and forth between the projected image and the set follow one another in perfectly controlled fluidity.
The past and the present also intertwine, like memory, which alone can bring together the living and the dead without worrying about chronology.
The Sky of Nantes crosses key moments in the history of France, the Second World War, the war in Algeria, immigration and the rise of the extreme right without being a historical fresco. It’s a terribly French, dense and colorful saga where you drink Ricqles, smoke Gitanes corn with or without a filter and watch Auto-Moto on Sunday mornings on TV. This is undoubtedly what makes the success of the play. Everyone deep down can find a piece of themselves and their family story.
“The Sky of Nantes” by Christophe Honoré
February 9 and 10, Espace Malraux – Chambéry
February 16 and 17, National Scene – Albi.
From February 23 to 25, La Criée – Marseille.
From March 5 to April 3, Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe – Paris.