ARCHIVES 2014 / Même les chevaliers tombent dans l'oubli

Once upon a time, during the 18th century, there lived the knight of Saint-George, a famous musician and talented fencer, a biracial man hailing from the West Indies. Today there lives an eight-year-old girl, hailing from the suburbs of Paris, who is convinced that under her white skin she is actually black and who picked for herself a boy's name, George. As questions of identity seem more relevant than ever, Gustave Akakpo offers here a reflection on what upsets and disturbs us. In a world in which human diversity should be a source of cultural wealth, the fear of the other is at the heart of this reflection on the quest for one's identity. By using the form of the dramatic fairy tale, Akakpo avoids all didacticism and offers instead a reverie anchored in the everyday life of a heroine looking for herself. Rising to the challenge posed by this character who is by turns black and white, Matthieu Roy creates a show halfway between the real and the illusion of the theatre, inviting his audience, regardless of their age, to enter this little girl's imagination. By the end of this surprising initiation journey, the theatre will appear as an echo chamber, a place where everything is possible for those children looking for a future they can build.

After graduating from the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Matthieu Roy chose to direct the contemporary texts that make up the repertoire of the Compagnie du Veilleur. By directing works by Elfriede Jelinek, Alberto Moravia, and Jean-Luc Lagarce, he began an artistic process whose next step would be a partnership with writer Christophe Pellet, directing his La Conférence (The Convention), Who's Afraid of the Wolf? and Un doux reniement (A Sweet Renunciation). He then asked Mariette Navarro to write a play, Prodigies®, which he created in English for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. Matthieu Roy also considers that his work as a director wouldn't be complete if he didn't transmit his knowledge and leads workshops in various schools, including the l'École internationale de Théâtre in Benin, where he met two of this play's actors. Created within the framework of a commission by the general council of Seine-Saint-Denis, Even Knights Get Forgotten is part of a cycle called “Face(s) of our Youth” (which also includes Marius von Mayenburg's Martyr and Fabrice Melquiot's upcoming Days of Nothing). Matthieu Roy's theatre, which uses multimedia in all of his creations, is at once scenographically surprising and always poetic.

At once a dramatist, a plastic artist, an actor, a storyteller, and an illustrator, Gustave Akakpo was born in Togo in 1974. Considering his work as a writer to also be that of an educator, he teaches numerous creative writing workshops in France, Togo, Tunisia, Syria, Belgium, Guyana, etc., and often works with convicts. He has written about fifteen plays, many of which have won literary awards. His works aim to forge links between different cultures and civilisations, and are often set at the intersection of the African and European continents. Gustave Akakpo also enjoys writing for an audience of children and teenagers, and never ceases to ask his contemporaries questions that can sometimes be disconcerting but are always relevant.

Jean-François Perrier, April 2014