COMPAGNIE FRICHE 22.66 THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNE Direction production and touring Camille Hakim Hashemi AV. E.-H. JAQUES-DALCROZE 5 Caroline Barneaud Mail : [email protected] Mail : [email protected] Elisabeth Le Coënt CH-1007 LAUSANNE +41 (0)76 428 23 48 Mail: [email protected] VINCENT MACAIGNE Je suis un pays Comédie burlesque et tragique de notre jeunesse passée Voilà ce que jamais je ne te dirai Je suis un pays (répétition) © Mathilda Olmi VINCENT MACAIGNE JE SUIS UN PAYS 2 JE SUIS UN PAYS Writing, directing, visuals and set Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne design : Coproduction : Vincent Macaigne Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national Scenography : Festival d’Automne à Paris Théâtre National de Bretagne, Rennes Julien Peissel La Colline-Théâtre national, Paris Props : Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg Lucie Basclet Théâtre national de Strasbourg Costumes : Holland Festival, Amsterdam Camille Aït Allouache La Filature, Scène nationale, Mulhouse Costumes intern : TANDEM, Scène nationale Estelle Deniaud Théâtre de l’Archipel-scène nationale de Perpignan Light : CDN Orléans/Loiret/Centre Matthieu Wilmart Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy et La Bâtie-Festival Light intern : de Genève dans le cadre du soutien FEDER du Edith Biscaro programme Interreg France-Suisse 2014-2020 Thanks : Sound collaboration : Théâtre de la Ville, Paris Charlotte Constant La Villette, Paris – Le Parvis-Scène nationale Tarbes- Video collaboration : Pyrénées Oliver Vulliamy Théâtre Ouvert - Centre National des Dramaturgies Directing assistant : Contemporaines Salou Sadras Musical composition : With the support of the Région Ile-de-France and the Nova Materia artistic participation of Jeune théâtre national (Caroline Chaspoul, Eduardo Henriquez) Production and technique : Compagnie Friche 22.66 is supported by DGCA - Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (FR) as national company. Setting’s construction : Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne’s workshop Creation on September 14th 2017 Administration Compagnie Friche 22.66 : at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne Altermachine : Camille Hakim Hashemi, Elisabeth Le Coënt With the production, techinal, communication and administration crews of Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne With : Sharif Andoura Candice Bouchet Pauline Lorillard Vimala Pons Rudolphe Poulain Hedi Zada Kids in alternation Video participation : Matthieu Jaccard and Eric Vautrin Production : Cie Friche 22.66 VINCENT MACAIGNE JE SUIS UN PAYS 3 JE SUIS UN PAYS A CAUSTIC READING OF IVANOV WITH NO COMPASSION, CLOSELY ALIGNED WITH CHEKHOV Ivanov has customarily been described as an ordinary man, a kind of affable anonym, a man of good intentions who has lost his past ambitions; an anti-hero sapped by a noxious society, who winds up losing everything by not having managed to reconcile his aspirations with reality, and by being swept along in the ambient mediocrity. He is traditionally depressed, melancholic, or cursed. But for Vincent Macaigne, this interpretation is far too obliging: it is too easy to accuse society in this way and clear the individual of his responsibilities. Aligning himself with Chekhov, Macaigne sees Ivanov more as today’s man in the street: neither honest or dishonest, pure or impure, pulled between an awareness of a sick society and his pathetic little negotiations to maintain his social position. Macaigne describes him as a wary man who has lost the courage of his dreams and who oscillates between condescending self-flagellation and an exacerbated conservatism that remains undefined, since it is masked by complacent complaints. The society he lives in is inherently sick, but he is no better. Once the drama has been stripped in this way of all its Romantic veneer, the director can tease out the idea that money is the motivation behind Chekhov’s drama, more than lost ideals. Ivanov needs money to maintain his dominion. All of his social interactions are determined by questions of debts and payments. His wedding with the Jewish Anna – which did not allow him to receive the dowry he expected and soon comes to reveal his latent anti- Semitism – serves in the text as much as a moral denunciation as it is a means of further highlighting the power of money over human relationships. In this caustic reading of Chekhov’s text, an interpretation closely aligned with the author, Ivanov the man appears not to be as perfect as he seems or allows himself to be described before the young and idealistic Sasha. He is not, as he has sometimes been described, depressed: the situation that Chekhov describes is much more practical than psychological. Thus the response of this man to this need for money will be to shut himself up within a group – despite the fact that he scorns its members – which thus progressively causes any idea of exteriority or any foreign presence to disappear, instead maintaining a latent and conservatism. Macaigne would call it fundamentalism, since the process is the same: this turning in on oneself while holding others in contempt. Ivanov will destroy what he himself has built; he prefers to demolish all of it because he can’t manage to save what he has created, finding nothing better than to self-destruct with a bang – this is the same path as the fundamentalist. REWRITING IVANOV IN ORDER TO SHOW THE AMBIGUITY OF HUMAN ACTION Vincent Macaigne thus makes this character the archetype of an archaic violence rather than an exemplary figure: remaining pure condemns him to do nothing, while undertaking something obliges concessions. Like Chekhov, his interpretation has nothing psychological or moral about it. It is not a matter of knowing who is honest and who is not: it is a human tension that Macaigne wants to stage, of the kind that pulls between ideals and communal life, which is just as likely to include action and feelings as it is politics. But Ivanov also describes for Macaigne a moment of radical change, when a being collapses and finds absolutely no support. The responsibilities are shared and there is not one right, ethically-neutral answer. In this perspective, between the individual and the collective, no ideal relationship exists but instead a tension that can only be resolved, as we shall see, through action – the very action that Ivanov does not undertake, nor anybody else around him, if not the young Sasha, who will nevertheless also crash against the wall of his smug idealism. VINCENT MACAIGNE JE SUIS UN PAYS 4 Must we attempt to understand why Ivanov acts this way? Must we analyse what was lacking? This is not the task that Macaigne undertakes – because he has no solution. He focuses much more on the ambiguity of the situation. In this way, he no doubt recovers the sociological analysis that Chekhov delivers – that of a society of backward-looking and idealistic aristocrats and intellectuals wrapped up in their incessant criticisms, confronted by a growing middle class that is spineless and lacking in ideals – transposed to today’s world, in a Europe that no longer believes in its history (the one that informed and guided it) and that has also failed to invent a new political and intellectual project. This is a Europe that, like Ivanov, is losing itself in conjectures, criticising everything and everyone, starting with itself, harping on with its ideals, now transformed into vacuous refrains, and eventually becoming responsible for destroying what it has built. Macaigne reads Ivanov as the description of this limbo, between criticism and action, dream of purity and the need for others, between the forgetting of the self and base actions, an in- between that leads to self-destruction if it is not overridden by action. This is the very meaning of his theatre, that he devises both as a means of understanding the self and a collective adventure that should allow everyone to be spurred into motion, to prove all together that action is possible and to surpass self-affliction – and in so doing, undo the fatalisms and blind reproductions of social and ideological models. Theatre thus responds for him to a need for exaltation that is above all the means of surpassing all that seems to be imposed on individuals – the weight of the past, hackneyed social conventions, and prefabricated dreams. It must therefore be “larger than life” and ignore limits, which it assumes as a mission of public service: to serve as a reminder that another life is possible. It won’t say what kind, thus causing everyone to individually ponder his or her own ambiguities. It refuses the roles of preacher, mentor, teacher and does nothing to reassure, but is instead a catalyst of energy, destroyer of repetitive and futile norms, or an outlet for sad passions. Thus in his rewritings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Macaigne leads his people into an incessant torment in order to “ensure that on stage the spectator and the actor are able to believe that this will not happen twice, that what is happening stems from accidents and unexpected events” and that nothing can be reduced to an abstract idea and presented as definitive. On this stage, life is invented in the moment, full of everything it is made of. Je suis un pays (répétition) © Mathilda Olmi VINCENT MACAIGNE JE SUIS UN PAYS 5 VOILÀ CE QUE JAMAIS JE NE TE DIRAI Conception and text : Vincent Macaigne With : Sharif Andoura, Thomas Blanchard, Candice Bouchet, Thibaut Evrard, Pauline Lorillard, Ulrich von Sidow, Hedi Zada Production : Cie Friche 22.66 Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne Coproduction : Nanterre-Amandiers, centre dramatique national – Festival d’Automne à Paris – Théâtre National