TO US PARIS!

PLAY OF THE WEEK

THE PURITANTS

ALL NAKED SHAME

Warning: head-on collision! Are you tired of honest, safe theatre? Then this culturally incorrect sexual firebrand is for you. Author and director David Noir goes beyond the formal framework of dramatic art to invite you to a festive and violent evening, even outrageous for some. No wonder: this man is a real terrorist in the eyes of all those who prefer to avoid this difficult confrontation with nudity, which is often banned from the classical stage. In the ring: eight men and one woman in severe black suits, corseted in the diktat of ordinary propriety. Gathered at their tables, our nine lecturers decipher the text of an imaginary play and share cigarettes and wine. Don't expect a china set. Here, the stemmed glass is strong.

Under the guidance of guru-psychoanalyst Harvey, First, Second, Slav, Adrien, Jean. Léa, Berta and Betty reveal themselves little by little (in the course of a primer), revealing their impulses, repulsions and perversions as merciless mirrors held up to our society. The actors (all to be celebrated) bare their bodies and souls, revealing behind the masks our own repressions, exposing our most extreme fantasies, awakening our consciences numbed since childhood. A midwife of buried truths, a meticulous recorder of our desires in love, David Noir and his company La Vie est Courte dig into our prejudices without diversions. Breathe in before continuing. What has been pointing out since the beginning finally arrives: stupor, gang rape, beating, murder, incest, zoophilia, transvestism... until the final Allegro Cruello. Is this a free work or a provocative mishmash? Everyone will judge according to their own sensitivity. Those who contemplate exhibition will see only shameless pornography. The others, including ourselves, will see it as an unidentified dramatic object, a bus manifesto that draws its strength from the abyss of a defrocked puritanism, close to Bataille. For here, the shambles that has been constructed is the image of our world: grandiloquent, magnificent, pathetic and derisory. On a stage transformed into a rock stage, the company continues to sing the little music of this exposure of bodies and affects. Nine choreographies and four songs (written by Jérôme Coulomb) are essential valves for the dizzying tension that punctuates this troubling inquisition of the conscience. At once discordant, tense and moving, this telluric happening will either bewitch or repel. What remains is a scenic incandescence, a subterranean force and a cunning word that conceals one of the most crazy and corrosive observations of our vain social comedy. In this great disturbing mess where childhood terrors and adult anxieties, past, present and future, mingle between laughter and humour, one feels sometimes jostled, often violated but terribly alive.

MYRIEM HAJOUI 03/07/00