ARCHIVES 2013 / Coma

In 2006, Pierre Guyotat, an engaged writer with a rebellious mind-set, published Coma, an autobiographical novel to which Patrice Chéreau is giving voice and body today. With the text in his hand, he strides across the bare stage, sometimes reading, more often incarnating. Through him, without the slightest artifice, Pierre Guyotat's words recount the infinite suffering of the being and the mind. They describe depression, the devouring place of art and the suicidal impulse, but also the necessity of living, the irrepressible need to express oneself, which turn out to be stronger than that physical and intellectual coma the author was the victim of. In 1988, Patrice Chéreau presented Hamlet and In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields at the Festival d'Avignon. He returned in 2011 with I Am the Wind.