Les Inrockuptibles

ARTS SCENES

David Noir and his actors throw their fantasies onto the stage vigorously and without coquetry. It's a sultry show in which everything is laid bare.

hard body

THE PURITANTS

Scenes    

Hot off the press! And let's stop quibbling about words. The stage as a theatre of desire? The theatre as a formal representation of its impulses? Let's take a look behind the scenes, brush aside the stage directions and surf on the fable, a simple support for the swarming life that moves it. Once you get into the swing of things, you're completely exposed. This was the somewhat crazy gamble taken by David Noir when he wrote Les Puritains two years ago and decided to stage it with nine actors (eight boys and one girl). Stanislas Nordey as part of Lectures du monde in 1998 at the TGP in Saint-Denis, Joël Dragutin in Cergy-Pontoise and Le Lavoir moderne in Paris last spring and this summer: few have taken the risk of relaying this explosive show in which the Puritains are the only ones to be performed. the gestures of love are played shamelessly, halfway between the grotesque and the most insolent, permanently doubling the petty-bourgeois drama of the Puritans. The game's interface, where the mental space dissected in public expands. Between rancid incest and sticky violence.

A long boardroom table, a few bottles of wine uncorked, and the story jolts from caricatured sketches to disillusioned tales, set to a motley soundtrack. It's reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's process when he edits the soundtracks to his films: immersing the negative, the dark side of the show, in a revealing bath of sound, in direct contact with the emotions of the actors and the audience. It's something of an intrusion," says David Noir, "a theatre that is resolutely negative: against the supremacy of the director, against the second skin or mask of the actor who disappears to make way for the character, against the aestheticism that distracts from the subject or recuperates it - which amounts to the same thing - against cultural preconceptions to the detriment of the challenges of art, against the hypocrisy of a theatre that has become the most prudish place there is. "The Puritans, it's what constitutes me, in spite of myself, it's the transport of an education from the nineteenth century, all the seeds of which we still carry and which is formidable. It's us, when we have no conscience. It's taking advantage of others, however small, psychologically, because you've been taken advantage of yourself. I hunt this abuse down everywhere, because I hate it, a deep and playful hatred that drives me. I'm angry that people don't leave me alone in my individualism and at the same time, I'm arrogant enough not to want to leave others alone. The Puritans, is to struggle with who you are. "Vigorously and without coquetry, David Noir and his band lay their fantasies on the table - a background in biology and palaeontology that may have left its mark? Homosexual or heterosexual lovemaking, sodomy, fellatio, masturbation, penetration, daring touching, anything can be played out and shown. The staging of desire is childlike, of course, but it's firmly woven into the fabric of a story that weighs heavily on the intention and form of the gesture. It's different from the trituration of the body's organs by choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel, for example, an activity stripped of all dramatic intensity. "The dance also speaks of intimacy, but it's immediately choreographed and that takes it elsewhere, away from the subject. The stripping down during rehearsals came gradually because, very quickly, we had the desire that it should go further than the text, that it should talk about what it's really about. What I write, I don't know where it comes from, it's a bit fossilised, freeze-dried. As an actor, I have to rehydrate it. It's very instinctive, emotional and visual. I turn theatre into a kind of terrorist commando operation. To construct thought, meaning, and above all not an aesthetic form - gay aesthetics bore me - or a political discourse".
Inevitably sulphurous...

Fabienne Arvers