How did Lieux communs (Common Places) become a theatrical thriller? What trigger—a news item, for instance—made you want to turn this true story into fiction?
This project is the result of a constant in my previous shows: they all take place in a single location, where a group of humans fight to try to be a community. It’s by bringing those two ideas together that the concept for Lieux communs came to me. As I thought about it, I realised that it had become one of the active principles of our extremely polarised times, when our lives are constantly exposed, at the risk of being reduced to amalgams or systematic simplifications. In this climate, so conducive to conflict, we sometimes fuel—despite ourselves—the very systems of assignment we have to endure. When we find ourselves exposed, we risk appearing as a caricature of ourselves, because we are on the defensive. What room is then left for uncertainty, for the expression of vulnerability? This text emerged more from a theoretical, even existential reflection on our troubled relationship with the “unresolved.” It was around this concept that fiction appeared to me as essential. What’s great about the thriller is that it sets up an investigation, which can be quite exhilarating, even though it is fuelled here by deeper questions about the notions of representation and qualification of the truth. The true story that ties all the situations of the play together creates an eruptive landscape, which allows for the expression of contradictions and ambivalences that are difficult to resolve.
At the heart of these “common places” are a perpetrator and a victim, around whom orbit other characters who are all affected by this tragedy. What did you want their confrontations to bring out?
The two main protagonists are always absent from the play, because the victim is thrown into a ghostly space and the identification of the accused rests on nothing but presumptions. What is mainly observed is the impact on the surrounding characters of the attempts to define those two figures, for we never find out if the man is guilty. What we can say for certain is that both of them are heirs to a certain virilism, a central theme in the play, and which could be defined here in two ways: on the one hand, a virilism of conquest generated by the law of the jungle, where might makes right. It’s the colonial system, patriarchy, finance; all those spaces where men of power exercise domination and strength to expand their jurisdiction. On the other hand, there is a virilism of defence, which arms itself under the assumption of a life-and-death struggle and aims to hide any vulnerability, under the pretence that vulnerability poses too high a risk of annihilation. The father of the victim is said to be an important far-right figure. The victim would therefore be the heir to that virilism of conquest, while the accused, being part of a lineage of men who have been discriminated against, would be the child of that virilism of defence. These two modes act like corrosive secretions that reshape emotions into a rigid and violent unity. As for the other characters, I never have a moral relationship with them, as I strive not to judge them. They reveal conflicts that concern us all, and allow the theatre to become a place for the dissection of our emotions. It’s not a form of relativism, but an invitation to be vigilant about the dogmatism that lies dormant within each of us.
The play is divided into three parts, each representing a different point of view. You argue for a dramaturgy of the unresolved. Is there nonetheless the possibility to emancipate oneself from these treacherous, archetypal terrains?
I don’t know if the goal is emancipation, but at least to find a way to name those terrains. In the first two parts of the play, we are in a theatre of situation. It is a time for reconstitution. We “replay” the scenes of the tragedy, trying every time to better understand and dissect them. At the end of the second part, we reach a scene of paroxysmal violence which leads to a dead end, but also creates a new perceptual framework, a new use of language. The third part becomes more of a theatre of narrative. The actors and actresses are no longer those characters we observe through a keyhole, caught up in fates that overwhelm them. This third movement restores their function as witnesses, in place of the audience. They share with us an interiority we did not have access to in the first two parts, and perhaps allow us to revise our judgment. I have called this last part “citations to appear,” to borrow the language of the courtroom. The relationship between the actors and the audience gradually changes over the course of the performance, turning this thriller into a theatrical adventure. Given that we find ourselves in a post-factual temporality and that facts are diluted within the characters’ interpretations, the play will be received according to each person’s perspective, since I don’t provide any resolution. I believe it is in this time of sharing, in this activation of the audience’s ethical and political responsibility, that an emancipatory answer can be found. The idea I want to share, which is a somewhat Brechtian idea, is that this story “could have” played out differently. It could have had a different ending, if only the characters had managed to extricate themselves from the structures that confine them. There is a part of euphoria in that idea, because it makes us active participants and refers us to our life drive.
Your play is also about works of art, and one of the characters is an art restorer. Are works of art a sort of common thread throughout the play?
The question of what can and cannot be represented, of the duality between abstraction and figuration, quickly led me into the realm of painting. Since the Renaissance, painting has been a window onto the world, aiming to reproduce it on a flat surface. Pierre Soulages saw painting as a wall. We explored the dialectic of the wall and the window in the scenography. With the two paradigms of abstraction and figuration, we imagined a vertical setting: a great wall, like the back of a theatre, with windows which open onto figurative spaces, in a game of opacity and transparency. It allows me to shift focus between the four situations (the police station, the backstage areas of a TV station and of a theatre, and the art restorer’s workshop) and to create a continuum between those situations, like intertwined long shots. Then these four locations burst open, and the space becomes more metaphorical. There is no longer any geographical assignation, and we enter into poetic immersion. Another reference I am interested in is a work by Russian painter Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. It is a painting that is regularly exhibited and vandalised by individuals belonging to Russian orthodoxy, which sees in that painting a form of Western propaganda against Great Russia. It depicts an autocrat who, in a fit of anger, murders his own son. But what you see in the father’s eyes is terror and remorse. And that’s the expression of this weakness, this uncertainty, that makes it something impossible and turns this painting into Western propaganda. Because that man cannot be weak. It echoes again the questions of virilism and vulnerability. In that gaze, one can also see the painful act of an artist wondering if he is justified in rehabilitating this murderous father. By showing his weakness, with what part of monstrosity does he compromise? In the painter’s notebooks, you can read that the painting tortured him, that it was very difficult for him to finish it. Here, the torment of the soul and the act of creation go hand in hand. It’s a question we find again with the director trying to adapt a collection of poetry by the man accused of murder. There is something unbearable and incomprehensible in her gesture, yet this ambivalence allows me to break down artificial roles which too often boil down to saying that there are on one side monsters who embody absolute evil and on the other victims who wear the mask of perpetual innocence. There is of course a risk in voicing this today, it could even be seen as a provocation by some, but I believe this show can only play its role by going beyond its framework to continue its effects after the performance.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux (January 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach