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MAGAZINE
THE PURITANTS
THEATRE (SMALL) BOAT
In the belief that it denounces the prevailing cultural puritanism, David Noir's play sinks into a childish exploration of the most conventional desires. To the point of collapse.
Les Puritains, written and directed by David Noir, Lavoir moderne parisien, Paris, 18th,
until the end of July.
Dear David Noir,
A few weeks ago you sent me a letter, "both personal and generic", intended for "men and women journalists", including myself. I replied to it by going to see, at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien, Les Puritains, which you wrote and directed. In your letter, you seemed to hope that "the relationship between the press and the artists would not take place in secret behind the tulles of propriety, but directly". I am therefore taking the liberty of addressing you directly, whom I saw for the first time a few days ago on stage, in the role of Harvey, "the psychoanalyst guru who abuses his power but who was also a child".
In your open letter to the critics, you write, "Come and get as excited about our adventure as we are about it. I hope I won't upset you by admitting that, unfortunately, I got much less excited than you did when I saw your Puritans playing pee-pee, while munching on chips, to old Sylvie Vartan hits. Don't think I was shocked by the saraband of soft sexes, triturated in front of the spectators' noses and other verbal jibes, just worthy of the playground of a Catholic school in Passy.
No. I simply did not like your show. I was even bored. Yet I came to see your play in the hope of discovering new writing, of being stirred by unexpected scenic challenges, of sharing with your characters a raw and resolutely contemporary word. Didn't you write to me that, faced with your disturbing Puritans, "the institution has always generally dragged its feet, but an enthusiastic and concerned audience is growing"? For the curious critic that I consider myself to be, this was a promise of pleasure to be shared.
Before entering the Lavoir Moderne Parisien, I was hoping to join the ranks of this enthusiastic and concerned audience. This was not the case. Before coming to meet you, I had also read a few articles praising you. An "explosive show" (Les Inrockuptibles), a "traumatic object, a manifest burn, an undeniable dramatic jewel" (L'Événement du jeudi). Libération even went so far as to speak of a "completely trashy play that the entire press hated".
But let's get back to your nice Puritans in suits and ties and Petit Bateau underwear. I searched in vain for controversy in your puerile enterprise of theatrical pseudo-destabilization. I've scratched my head to see the slightest possibility of a post-modern version of a mini-battle of Hernani, but I can't. Where is the scandal, the "real, tangible subversion", the "thirst for freedom" that you claim in your "closed letter" addressed "to French cultural institutions"? What is so dramatically revolutionary about the scenic exhibition of homo or hetero fantasies that regularly delight the redneck followers of Canal +'s après-minuit and provincial backrooms? What subliminal message, of a Freudian nature, do you hope to convey, by threading the erotic-bourgeois poncifs (daddy-mommy-dog-and-me!) that feed all the well-intentioned literature of the time?) that feed the whole fucking literature of the years when he-didn't-pass-by-me? Seeing your show, I realize that the fantasies of dirty panties, of touching peepee with tweezers and of do-me-bad-but-not-too have still a lot of good days ahead of them. Dear David. Allow me to call by his first name a young man whose anatomy I know has been abused on stage by his little Sunday school friends. Dear David, I imagine you are intelligent enough not to believe that it is enough to talk about "pubic hair", to show garlands of testicles or to mime an orgy on stage to impress the bourgeoisie or the libidinous followers of the swingers' clubs of the French countryside dear to Renaud Camus. Obscene and provocative exhibition only makes sense in the theatre if it goes beyond the aesthetic and commercial clichés of the society of the spectacle that it intends to deflower. A rape is not an exercise in style. In the theatre, it must be a deflagration so that it does not sink into dubious solicitation. Don't pretend to believe that we can deal with subjects that you consider "thorny by the theatrical authorities" such as the anatomy of desire and its multiple repressions, by bringing out for the umpteenth time the Redoute catalogue as a Bible for learning the gestures of adolescent auto-eroticism and other stories of castrating mothers and children who refuse the phallic dictatorship of fathers.
You know that, David. Genet, Pasolini, Koltès, Rez a Abdou and so many other dynamiters of world theatre have gone much further in their subversive exploration of the dark forces of desire and the trauma of the body that enjoys or suffers. The difference with your pre-pubescent work is that their theatre had a boner. A real one. Not the one that complacently stages itself, adopting the tics of television language (like an erotomaniac Psy Show!) and the Viagra-fuelled dialogues of the badly fucked people who populate your theatre.
Nothing serious, by the way. You are not, dear David, the only creator to confuse the stage with his psychoanalyst's couch and the theatre with the sewer. Your Puritans are naive children who wade into the sandbox of their sexual identity on a rainy day and imagine that it's the flood. You say you have a "tenacious childhood". This is undoubtedly a quality. It's also sometimes a flaw when you're still, at 37, at the stage of poo-poo and Petit Bateau underwear, which your Puritans, incidentally, advertise very convincingly. The future of theatre is perhaps, if you are to be believed, in children's lingerie made of 100 % cotton.
ACHMY HALLEY (www.theatremag.com>20/06/00)
I am reproducing below the response I sent back to Mr. Achmy Halley at the time, particularly for its historical value. 😁
It is amusing to note how the crystal ball of this visionary turned out to be quite foggy as far as the "future of the theatre" is concerned, when we see how the nude and its "garlands of testicles" which seemed to put him off so much at the time, have flourished 15 years later, on the most prominent stages; not to mention the immense stage dedicated to pornography, which many were thirsty to consume freely and which the Internet turned out to be.
By David Noir / The Puritans at Achmy Halley / Theatre Magazine
Dear little comet, (you must have had it done to you often)
The weather is fine, the sun is shining, the children are doing well; Wednesday is fine, Thursday is fine, Friday is fine!
It's me, David Noir.
Your adorable pinched article, my little battered critic, doesn't seem very deft to me. I'm very sad about that. Thank you for your two pages, but you would have done better to ignore us so as not to betray your confusion; that would have been more clever. I am happy to admit it, otherwise I wouldn't be writing to you. So we surely have hidden connections, but I won't go and see what they are. Nevertheless, I'm not really going to answer you, my little fireball, because your writing smells too much like a good student at his little magazizine. You're still a nice clown of the pen and you'll get a good point out of your essay. As I tell you, my cozy darling, I'm not going to repeat your expected arguments. No, I'm not going to teach you how to read, write, hear or see. Go to your innermost feelings for that. My answer to the delicate little rascals of your kind is already contained upstream in my show, and that's why you're eagerly diving into your vehement logorrhea. I just want to let you know that I'm not your dear David, nor anything for you, and that if you feel like addressing me in that tone again, we'll all come to your little diary to give you lots of big kisses. You know, like any egocentric artist, I don't like being criticized too much because it makes me sad afterwards. It's nice of you to assume that I'm intelligent, but I already know that and that doesn't stop me from thinking that you're not too intelligent. I don't like saying mean things to you, so I'll stop. But still, I think it's a pity that the shameful beauty of the pee-touch, which certainly also shook the candor of your childhood, escapes you so much. Maybe it's normal; many of us opt for blindness at this difficult time of life - too scared, no doubt. I think you'll do better in a recognized field, with Genet, Koltès or Pasolini, of whom you seem to me to be an authentic discoverer. One last word, my little weasel; I would like this letter to be published on your little website, in front of your big smoking firecracker that must still be making big Boom Booms in your little head; and that, without changing a word, thank you.
One more word (I'm unforgivable); it's quite funny to note that you take care to ignore the form of my work, a little too elaborate for you to discern it, it's true (I'm unforgivable), but that you fiercely focus on the substance or what seems to you to be the substance; and that indeed everyone knows by heart: the ass, the desire, the pain, etc... So masturbate well in your great authors, and try a rectal threading of The Search for Lost TimeYou'll be hearing from me. Please refrain from calling the members of the group "girlfriends"; homophobia has a bad press these days. Thank you for Sonia, whose pussy I can't see in your "testicle garland". The unfortunate woman obviously didn't catch your eye. I don't know if she'll get over it. So you're a real, tough, pure Puritan like we like; one of those who claim the "Ever More Powerful", the Original, the Genius, the Bitch, the Life to the fullest, and the Monumental Tail. In short, a lover of fantasy in all its forms, unhappy with the banality of real life, ashamed of his little urine stain at the bottom of his pants, for whom Art has to make the human being "bigger" than he is.
Unfortunately, you see nothing but what you have been taught to see; you know only the facade of this pretty theatre which attracts you and you miss your own filthy and delicate intimacy which you despise. Go, then, great man! Go and get hard as you dream, little heart. The theatre that I love is the magnificent sewer that you describe and the little white ducks of which you are, are at pains to dip their feathers in its brackish waters. Goodbye, then, brilliant absence, good wind, and make a pretty tail while thinking of me; it will perhaps make that of your short comet sparkle.
DN.
