ARCHIVES 2012 / La nuit tombe…

A single place – a hotel room – for three stories that cross and intertwine: that of two sisters, Wolfgang's and Susann's. The play imagined by Guillaume Vincent seems like a script that would be used to do theatre. “A stage machine” as he calls it, which undoubtedly found its inspiration in the film-makers he particularly likes (Bergman, Bresson, Buñuel and Fassbinder) and plunges us into a universe where fantasy and reality are closely entangled, where the past and the present sometimes merge, where the living and the dead talk to us without worrying about their status. A fantastic evasion that plays with the reversal of situations, while relying on a dramatic framework peopled with small pebbles that permit the spectators to follow this twisting path, like children entering the world of fairy-tales. Guillaume Vincent chose to develop his story, the setting of a hotel room, a place that we pass through without really stopping, a place bearing the memory of those who were there before us and who, perhaps, like ghosts, may reappear. So, in this imaginary hotel somewhere in old Havana or Shanghai in the 1930's, in South America or today's Russia, strangeness is acceptable. We hear stories about family, sisters and father, marriage and separation, love and disaffection, hopes and failures that carry us along in a fascinating rondo, that of the suspense of life. JFP