ARCHIVES 2009 / Littoral, Incendies, Forêts

Littoral, Scorched, Forests

First three parts of the quartet
"Le sang des promesses" (The Blood of Promises)

The Cour d'honneur will ring out with words of the epic, with sounds and images of a great odyssey which, from dusk to emerging dawn, will carry the spectators into the mazes of Wajdi Mouaward's world. In Littoral, when Wilfrid decides to go and bury, in his native land, the father that he did not know, but the organisation of whose funeral is incumbent on him, he goes without knowing it in search of the very foundation of his existence. In Scorched, it is on the tracks of a father they think is dead but whom they discover is alive, that Jeanne and Simon leave for the country of their deceased mother whose painful past is revealed in snatches as their trip unfolds. It is also by going back along the trail of his origins that Loup, the young heroine of Forests, haunted by an indescribable anguish, will be faced with the past of her ancestors. Three odysseys that take us to where the dead frequent the living in search of their identity, where the dead speak to their descendents, without fear or shame. Inserting the story into legend, it is through a dialogue with the gods, with the forces that go beyond us, that the author and director weaves the thread that forever links us with the  promises we have kept and betrayed. In this way he establishes a kind of transmission. “The most wonderful stories,” he repeats, “are those that come from the shadows to burst out in the light of the stage, where victims, torturers and judges can talk, without any Manichaeism, about the eternal conflicts and dramas of humanity.” With this saga, it is war, exile, the search for identity, the quest for the father, the frustrations due to absence or death, the torments of a fragmented, betrayed, inconsolable childhood – in short, everything that constitutes the world's pain and the search for relief –, that is presented to us here in a burning and devouring manner. Littoral, Scorched, Forests: three adventures that, to the rhythm of the carnal, generous and vigorous writing of their author, take us into the meanderings of these modern tales that are so obviously incarnated in the actors' bodies that we, the spectators, are disturbed in the depths of our being. Without rejecting the references to the contemporary dramas that we experience every day, Wajdi Mouawad broadens his vision and ours, digging the groove of memory. The one that recalls and the one that imagines, to know how to stay alive in the midst of disaster. An eternal question asked to art in general and to theatre in particular. JFP