ARCHIVES 2015 / Riquet

Three actors on a stage, getting ready to play a game of princes and princesses. But the prince was born ugly, and of the two princesses living in the nearby kingdom, one is beautiful and stupid, the other ugly and incredibly smart. Quite the dilemma indeed! How to go about adapting Charles Perrault's fairy tale, Riquet with the Tuft, today? The text, written by Antoine Herniotte, plays with the stigmatisations and misadventures of the figures of the scapegoat, the head of the class, and the beauty queen. Their successive encounters force them to face the difference between the appearance and the essence of things.For love to blossom, they will have to understand the other, not as he or she is, but as he or she has the potential to be, because everything is projection. See for instance the white paper wall that serves as a canvas for the painting, live, of an ever-changing set. Riquet remains at its core a fairy tale, but a modern one, meant for all audiences, a tale whose three central figures have to master their fate to choose their own future. Its resonance in our society so influenced by more-than-ever normative media is particularly welcome.

Nicknamed “the jeep” at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, where he began before assisting François Rancillac, Laurent Brethome is an all-terrain director. Proudly hyperactive, the 34-year-old has directed about thirty shows, moving from one genre to the next with the same energy and generosity. Georges Feydeay and Hanoch Levin both played an important part in his artistic development—he brought them together in Court Carnage (Short Carnage) in 2012—along with Copi, Jean Racine, Philippe Minyana or, more recently, Molière (Les Fourberies de Scapin). Every one of his creations is accompanied and fed by shorter shows, workshops, and encounters, so many opportunities to be as close as possible to a new audience, or one that has already been won over. Originally from Vendée, where his company Le Menteur volontaire organises a festival each summer, Laurent Brethome seems nonetheless to be from everywhere he goes, as an artist-in-residence or on tour. In the suburbs of Paris or the Jura mountains, he leads, with his many partners-in-crime, an artistic and militant experiment for a popular theatre which he defines, quoting Jean Dasté, as “playful, festive, and challenging.”

RIQUET
“My lovely princesses. Among all the princes who will come from all the kingdoms of our kingdom, there will be one. That one will think nothing of who you are, of what others say you are, neither in good or in bad. He will think nothing of it. He will be like bewitched by the knowledge of what he could become if he stayed by your side. For each of you, there will be such a one. One of whom you will think nothing, nothing of who he is or of what others say he is, neither in good or in bad. You will think nothing of it. You will be like bewitched by the knowledge of what you could become if you stayed by his side.” Excerpt from Antoine Herniotte's Riquet.