Verso

ARTS AND LETTERS

N°16 October 1999

THEATER

ATTENTION, FRAGILE

by Pierre Corcos

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet: "There is in life a kind of awkwardness, a fragility of health, a weak constitution, a vital stammering that is one's charm. Charm, the source of life, like style, the source of writing" (Interviews). Childhood, tenuousness, delicacy, ephemerality... Our time, with its perpetual demonstrations of strength, understands nothing of this. Even in the theatre, it is well seen to display overwhelming and spectacular stagings, indications of a solid establishment, consolidated in the institution. The "culturally correct" has no use for fragility, of course. David Noir, on the other hand, puts himself totally at risk: the show he has written, Les Puritains, directly stages sexuality, while cynical libertarianism and 'learned' sexology on the one hand, and reactionary or neo-liberal puritanism on the other, the troubled, fatal, indecisive and shattering moment of the encounter with the bodies of others seems to have definitively escaped our perception. Here, there is nothing dressed up or dressed down (read again Roland Barthes' astonishing pages on striptease in Mythologies), but an authentic exposure of affects and bodies. Nothing erotic either, playing on the phallic figure of the female body. Not even obscene, in the etymological sense of "bad omen", despite David Noir's violently pornographic writing, because it would be impossible to affirm that the play, by its crudity, does not presage anything good. On the contrary, in the anarchist movement -Panic- (Topor, Arrabal), inspired by a surrealism with dazzling metaphors, it tells us, through a series of short scenes (as many as there are letters of the alphabet), the fragility, the uncertainty, the instability of desire, its vital stuttering... Despite the excellent, rather cinematographic editing of the whole and the risky musical accompaniment (kitschy references), subtle, there remains a sort of "trembling", an incompleteness, a gaucherie of this adolescent, almost childlike staging, which is the source of its charm. Nine actors are totally involved in this precarious adventure, which a brutal ban or a gross misunderstanding could easily destroy. Until now, only Stanislas Nordey and Joël Dragutin, as theatre directors, have been sensitive to this type of show.