ARCHIVES 2014 / Falstafe

Young prince Hal, the future King Henry V, wastes his time and energy following around the old John Falstafe, a master in debauchery, to his father's dismay. But when the king's enemies declare war on him, the prince is called back to his destiny and his duty: to defend the crown by facing Percy in a duel, even if that means dying. Dying? Falstafe will have none of it. In 1975, when he adapted Shakespeare's Henry IV for Marcel Maréchal, Valère Novarina had his play revolve around the fool's obsession with remaining young, in spite of his age, his paunch, and his baldness. Made for children as much as it was inspired by them, Lazare Herson-Macarel's version focuses on Falstafe's playful relationship to reality. If, for Shakespeare, the world is a stage, for Falstafe, life itself is but a game. Thus so is death. The old man would rather play a thousand different roles than that of the adult people want him to be, and he is determined to replace virtue and honour with illusion and levity. Although Percy is actually young, he embodies the deadly seriousness that Falstafe flees and foils. If the prince, as faithful a disciple as his shameless old companion ever had, ends up responding to the gravity of his circumstances by accepting his responsibilities, Falstafe remains to the end a bold coward and, thanks to successive about-faces, leaves the battlefield a victor.

What better place to build a theatre than a garden dedicated to youth? When, in 2009, Lazare Herson-Macarel invites his companions to build, far from Paris, a stage that will soon become the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire, it isn't to flee the capital, but to establish a place where they can guarantee for themselves “a youth lovely, heroic, and fabulous.” Borrowing from Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, Lazare Herson-Macarel chooses for his motto the perseverance to “to hail the birth of new labour, new wisdom.” Every August in Maine-et-Loire, the NTP organises a festival, which fulfills the conditions of this renewal. Members of the company trade places, become alternately actors and directors, and are thus able to stave off the lethargy that habit engenders. The spirit of Jean Vilar no doubt guided the company to Avignon, seeing as how they already live his ideal of a theatre open to everyone every day in Fontaine-Guérin.

Actor, director, writer, painter, Valère Novarina works with words and matter as a “decomposer.” He reinvents on the page and in space this strange thing that, according to him, came to us fully-formed: language. A language that, risen back from the depths, needs to be untangled and tangled back up to reveal its origins and its meaning. Putting the energy and the flux of words at the centre of his theatre, Valère Novarina aims to reach, through the concrete projection of text into space, an intuitive understanding of what makes us unique as “talking animals.”

Marion Canelas, April 2014