ARCHIVES 2013 / Le Début de quelque chose

In a world in full upheaval, in the North as much as in the South, for Myriam Marzouki, the theatre remains the place where it is still possible to take time for reflection, thanks to fiction that permits going beyond an oppressive and moving reality. With the aim of moving away from daily life, magazine images, common places and superficial analyses, she seizes upon a fictional text to get as close as possible to our questions on a common future that would prevent continents drifting apart, an isolation that would intensify fear. In deciding to adapt Hugues Jallon's text, The Beginning of Something, Myriam Marzouki plunges us first into the reality of a country on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, considered as a land of welcome for tourists reassured to feel among themselves, protected in closed clubs. Very quickly, she takes us to another universe in which the time of the narrative stretches out, in which reference points become blurred, in which the comfort of summer holiday-goers is hindered by vague threats from the exterior, perhaps those caused by the people's revolutions that agitated the Arab world. The voices of the two “managers” of the holiday centre are added to the residents' words carried on stage by a chorus formed with the participants of a workshop she ran in Pantin, just outside Paris. The club becomes an entrenched site, which has something of a TV reality show, a prison, an asylum, and a transit or refugee camp about it. At the very heart of an extremely contemporary narration, the spectator is invited to share obviously political questioning on the contradictions that come to mind. Distanced from the political-media language that too often simplifies and shuts in, he experiences a poetic language, sometimes comic, sometimes ironic: that of a fiction that here becomes truer than true. JFP

Since 2004, Hugues Jallon has published three works: The Base. Investigation Report on a Point of Imbalance on the High Seas, then Combat Zone, which was adapted twice for the theatre, and lastly The Beginning of Something in 2011. Three literary and political texts, each developing a critical analysis of the world and its domination mechanisms, through stylistic research that plunges the reader into strange worlds, where fiction is always backed by easily recognizable realities.