“Zoé”, the new play by Julie Timmerman puts a child face to face with her bipolar father: explosive

After two successes around geopolitical and ideological subjects “A Democrat” and “Bananas”, Julie Timmerman deals with a family experience disrupted by illness.

With A DemocratJulie Timmerman tackled Edward Bernays, propaganda theorist, and Bananas peeled the banana bunches of Central America. With Zoethe author and director does not go on stage this time, but reveals a part of herself, evoking her education and her evolution in a family whose bipolar father introduces alienation into the house.

Neither pathos nor didacticism

The only daughter of a couple of actors, Zoé sees days of joy and anger succeed one another depending on the bipolar disorder that affects her father. At 8, 10 and 40 years old, with the help of her friend Victor, then a psychologist, Zoé tries to find her place between an unhinged father, but who nourishes her with the culture she adores, and a mother overwhelmed by a responsibility that she struggles to cope. Until the day Zoé decides that she will save her dad.

The precise, evocative and poetic language of Julie Timmerman is always there in Zoe. If we did not expect it in this intimate register, its subject retains a political dimension by raising awareness of a pathology that we have only been talking about for a short time. Without pathos or didacticism, the drama is there, but the author maintains her perspective, infusing a humor whose spirit is one of her constants in each of the pieces. The sense of rhythm is another, Zoe passing at breakneck speed, we would be asking for more.

The spark of words

In three acts, in a family kitchen, Zoe sees a mother and her daughter go from calm to storm, from love to anger, from compassion to disgust, according to the “swings” of her father. Rather than narrative, the three acts unfold like three paintings, depicted in three eras, three stages of the disease. This evolution results in the narrative progression that Julie Timmerman knows how to use, both in writing and directing.

Also, the play gains momentum like the father’s crisis and the words are important. All it takes is one to cause a spark, then combine with another, like two flints, and then one more, to set the body on fire and set the scene ablaze. Like when his father fell onto the kitchen table, which became an abyss into which he fell and which swallowed him. One of the stage ideas that Julie Timmerman is full of with her four actors, whose team spirit sets the stage on fire.

Zoe
By Julie Timmerman
Director: Julie Timmerman
With: Anne Cressent, Mathieu Desfemmes, Alice Le Strat and Jean-Baptiste Verquin
From January 5 to February 29, Wed. Thu. Fri. Sat. 9:15 p.m.
Belleville Theater
16 Passage Piver, 75011 Paris
Such. : 01 48 06 72 34