ARCHIVES 2013 / Au pied du mur sans porte

Once upon a time there was a young man whose name was Dragonfly... He was seven years old when his author, Lazare, made him the hero of his play. He would be 17 at the end of the story, 17 years spent in a disadvantaged suburban neighbourhood, in a rundown housing project where he runs into friends and enemies, representatives of authorities and dealers. All of them are a full-fledged part of his universe over which an attentive mother reigns. If Dragonfly lives in the reality of the world that surrounds him and brutalizes him, he is constantly beyond his limits, constantly outside the conventional, unclassifiable, unadapted, because he preferred since early childhood “the dreams at school”. It is in this in-between space, this no man's land between the imaginary and reality that he only shares with a stillborn twin who is always at his side that the young hero isolates himself, shuts himself up, protects himself, between guilt and the desire for freedom. Avoiding what might only be a documentary theatre, Lazare, through the magic of an inventive writing, takes us much farther than description, explanation, and personal account. The theatre's stage becomes the place for poetic, creative and crossbred words, permitting each character to have “his” language, his interiority, his power. This very precise, textual, corporeal and musical score structures a staging that acts through simple and sensitive images, borne by a collective of artists involved in this irrational but terribly alive universe. JFP