How long this theatre is, before it starts!

How long it lasts, too, once it gets going!

I don't intend to use this blog to post reviews of shows, and besides, I don't get paid for it. Nevertheless I post here a simple reaction, not an analysis, to Copi's play, "An Untimely Visit" staged at the Athénée and which I saw a performance of yesterday.

I don't go out much, preferring to stick to my own work rather than look at that of others, but naturally I sometimes go to see friends perform, to be attracted by unknown and intriguing creations or, more rarely, to give in to the desire to take the temperature of what is currently being done on the Paris stages. In this case, yesterday it was a question of discovering a new performance by the formidable and inventive actor Michel Fau.

Obviously, waiting in the lobby of a place like the Athénée, with its audience of grotesque, worldly freaks, never bodes well. Nothing changes from this point of view.

Every theatre has its social ridicule

The show, always the same, begins there in these places of representation, with the tragic decayed faces of the old, made-up people who pretend to laugh, and those of the younger ones, dressed up for the occasion, who also show beautiful rows of teeth. Some of them pretend to forget about death, others betray that they do not really suspect its reality yet. This usual ballet being bracketed in my mind, I sat down, waiting for the friend who accompanied me and for the play that was about to begin.

It's finally starting... and it's going to end... the same way

I won't detail the staging, the set, the costumes, the acting ... all vociferating with the same shouting and immutably projected voice. Good old technique; a boulevard, nothing more. Obviously, all the clichés one can expect when imagining Copi are there. A misery of imagination that does not do justice to the text whose subtlety is easily trampled by such heavy hooves. Indeed, Copi is difficult to stage; perhaps not very necessary either in this "spectacular" and corny form. In short, it doesn't matter, the only real and dismaying question that sticks in my brain after this evening, and which is neither a mean joke nor a clever trick, is: how can we still put on such crap under the aegis of supposedly serious professionals and call it "theatre"?

Without the protection of enlightened guides, the big players also become blind

The second one, more anecdotal and personal, is: how is it that a stage genius like Michel Fau, which I always think is the case, restrains himself or allows himself to be restrained to the point of not expressing any fantasy where one would expect all of his, usually so poetic, imagination?

These are truly things that hurt and intrigue me when I see the comedy, humour and sensitivity of actors and authors killed before my eyes by the heavy hand of a management and production that lacks imagination and vision, indulging in the most conventional of pseudo-folies when it thinks it is giving life to a crazy and unrestrained carnival.

It is difficult to console oneself when one thinks that they embody the most important image of the French show business. amateur and most common in the imagination of a good part of the population, of that distressing business which is still called the theatre. Alas! Alas! Alas!