ARCHIVES 2011 / Le Suicidé

How can a small event in daily life - an irrepressible night time hunger - lead to a series of unpredictable consequences and bring a poor starving man to the edge of death? When Semyon Podsekalnikov wakes up in the middle of the night, little does he know that in a few hours he will find himself in the position of a man about to commit suicide, wooed by a number of his fellow men who want to use his act to stand up for their many and various interests. Through a simple misunderstanding, Nikolai Erdman builds an infernal drama machine that, once in motion, can no longer stop. Family, friends, neighbours take part in a mad race that could appear as a pleasant comedy of manners if it did not hint at the image of a whole society: that of Stalin's Soviet Union. It was precisely the reason why the author never saw his play staged, the censors having struck before the first representation. Though this scathing portrait of a schizophrenic world remains, of course, topical, it is above all the metaphysical questions on life and death expressed by this play that make it so close and so disturbing to us. We laugh a lot at the misfortunes of Semyon Podsekalnikov, a victim manipulated by the madness that surrounds him, but in the end almost consenting to it. And we are also moved by his fate and by that of all the characters who push him to commit the irreparable: a group of human specimens who attempt by any means to have their voice heard, to simply survive. In a country where "only a dead man can say what a live man thinks," the only way to escape the nightmare is perhaps to make it totally farcical. It is what Nikolai Erdman, reduced to silence in his time, did with courage and talent. This inspired Patrick Pineau - who interprets the title role - and his troupe to take over this text, which has been assassinated then brought back to life, to celebrate the power of theatre.

Written in 1928, The Suicide is the second and last play by Nikolai Erdman (1902-1970). Though the Russian playwright's first work, The Mandate, had been a tremendous success, his later work met with an entirely different fate. A few days before the premiere, despite the director Meyerhold and the writer Bulgakov's support, the play was censored by the Stalinist regime. Arrested several times, exiled out of Moscow, Nikolai Erdman gave up writing for the theatre. He died in 1970, 12 years before The Suicide was first staged in Russia, and 17 years before the play was published for the first time. A writer in a period hostile to criticism and freedom of expression, Nikolai Erdman knew how to skilfully use comedy to serve a subject that was both humanist and political, in the same way as Gogol, to whom he is often compared.

JFP