ARCHIVES 2009 / Mon Képi blanc

The Foreign Legion. A reality and a myth that fascinates and questions, creates shivers and fantasies. Sonia Chiambretto is interested in it as she lived near the barracks in Aubagne for a few years. She questioned these men, who come from everywhere and nowhere, these unknowns who are reborn in another life when they penetrate this closed universe. From these interviews, she has drawn a text made of sparse fragments that Hubert Colas has chosen to present like a monologue, giving it to an exceptional actor, Manuel Vallade. He alone incarnates all these soldiers, these murmured confidences, these whispered confessions that disturb the Épinal images made up of honour and solidarity. It is the solitude, the exile, the violence, the wandering that are evoked in an idiom built from many European and other languages. This language, which uses only French words, becomes “mixed”, the bearer of a very great musicality. It is this mixture that makes up the material allowing the actor to play on many different registers. Before our eyes, he makes this language, very written, very intricate, very organised on the blank page, come alive, respecting, even to its punctuation, the work on paper. Filmed live, the actor is doubly on the stage. Nothing is lost of his words, his silences, his expression, everything that can express the universe of the Foreign Legion and its so particular language. We laugh, sometimes, at these cut-and-dried formulas that have been injected into these men's skulls and that they repeat like robots. But very quickly, emotion returns to the story of a daily life totally dedicated to war and combats, a daily life without a past and whose future is uncertain. The rigour of the text's composition, of the staging and of the acting combine to create a moment of real theatre, both fascinating and powerful. JFP