With literature, you’ve found one of your favourite sources of inspiration. Why did you choose to once again use a non-dramatic text by adapting W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, three years after Austerlitz?
I believe that we’re going through a time of crisis in dramatic writing. Playwrights often tell a story through dialogues between their characters, dialogues which often feel forced and very anarchic; but the world is too complex for its story to be told through this single device. I’m fascinated by the zones that exist beyond the dialogue, somewhere at the edges of our humanity—and it’s that edge that W.G. Sebald strives to reach through literature. Which makes him a rather unique author: by not providing a psychological analysis of his characters in order to respect their mystery, he questions the very way writing can explore the world and reach the heart of the human. What’s most painful, most private, most fundamental remains in the end unreachable without falling into lie. Don’t we all often feel like language is insufficient, that it betrays us as soon as we try to explore what touches us the most? As soon as our thoughts are expressed through words, they become, in a way, trivial. W.G. Sebald knows it, and thus keeps a form of silence when it comes to what’s most important. There’s a sort of magic to this form of literature, which tries to express the unexpressed through a sort of osmosis between the mind of the writer and that of the reader. I try to do the same thing at the theatre: to express things not only with words, but thanks to what exists between the words.
The Emigrants is made up of several stories, with a narrator trying to learn about different protagonists. For this show, you’ve decided to focus on two of them: Paul Bereyter and Ambros Adelwarth…
Those two stories share a common core: they both focus on figures somehow related to the narrator—a teacher, a great-uncle—which he can only know through what other characters say of them. Did things really happen that way? And how can someone we thought we were so close to can turn out to be a stranger? We’re faced with mysteries—fatal mysteries, as they both end in failure, misery, and death. The narrator’s fascinated, his investigation turns into a sort of spiritual quest. Because he can’t be sure of anything, he breaks free from a literal narrative and lets mirages wash over him, searing moments of revelation that are like so many small eruptions of unruly visions. W.G. Sebald thus creates, through his use of silence, strokes of heresy in the narrative. It has the same effect on the reader’s imagination—and, I hope, on the spectator’s—who also breaks free from the narrative. Those stories we read, or watch onstage, were they experienced by real people, or are they figments of someone’s imagination? Did we make up those eruptions of life? We can’t know; but I doubt that’s the most essential question.
W.G. Sebald approaches History via the prism of exile and, more largely, of lost identity… Why is that question particularly important for you today?
The stories in The Emigrants all share the same motif—the fate of the Jews of Europe—which, in Ambros Adelwarth’s case, is connected to the question of homosexuality. Two subjects tied together in History by the Nazi enterprise of extermination. The reoccurrence of this motif might well reveal a personal projection of the narrator—of this inner Jew he created himself, within the German he is. W.G. Sebald uses his characters as a Trojan horse to express his own identity and his own mysteries. The question of exile, over which he obsesses, and which I also want to tackle, cannot be reduced to a political programme or speech; it’s something much more essential, like a way of touching our humanity. Those ghosts, those lives irremediably lost, embody what I call a cultural Shoah—a concept I think is capital, and much larger than the story to which it is attached. It refers to the irremediable imprint the Nazi project of destruction left in each of us, and how it influences human relations, both on a personal and a political level, until today. Sebald, in his work, broadens our vision of the Holocaust.
I think it’s essential to tackle this question, especially today. We thought the past would serve as a lesson, but we seem to have lost our bearings again. There comes a time when this thing we instinctively understood, what makes us human—we don’t understand it anymore, to the point that we lose sight of the meaning of our lives. Why does Bereyter kill himself? Why does Ambros follow in his partner’s footsteps, twenty years later, by checking himself into the same asylum to die? It’s this weakening, this tipping point, that W.G. Sebald tries to express, and which I want to show on stage, to try to give a glimpse of this primordial mystery.
How do you give shape to those characters—those ghosts, as you said—through your work on stage?
I can already sense the direction I’d like to work on with the actors, but the way this work is going to unfold, to create this spark in them, remains a great mystery. We have two types of characters: the ghosts of people who have disappeared, and those who tell stories of those ghosts. They’re like two different instruments, sort of like the lens of a microscope and the object you observe through it. What we watch unfold onstage is an attempt by one group to save the other from annihilation—this cultural Shoah I was talking about—and to bring back to life, through passion and force of will, what was forever lost. But can we, through the lone presence of the actor, evoke this spectral reality, when all we know of the life of a man is but scattered scraps, fragments, seconds? All ghosts want to live, like vampires who drink blood to escape death. Similarly, the lost particles of those protagonists try to come together to return to life. That’s how you end up with moments of illumination exploding like geysers.
You’re also a plastic artist; how did you create the scenic space where the show takes place?
I pictured the stage as a ruined place. It could be a room where someone used to live, which would have become a sort of double of that person—or, as Thomas Bernhard would have wanted, the walls of the brain, those walls that prevent the “I” from spilling out. But it could also be a synagogue, a church… The ruin erases the essence, the nature of what it was before it was a ruin. It’s at once what remains of a past thing and the symbol of its loss—of the elements that made it, but also of what meaning it may have had. In that sense, it contains many possibilities of transformation. As the Romantics said, ruins are an invitation to travel for our imagination…
With this show, what relationship do you hope to establish with the spectators’ imagination?
I never plan the effect I want to produce. The journey on which I embark with each new show is motivated by an energy that’s independent from me and my intentions. What I want here is to communicate W.G. Sebald’s deep silence, and thus to share with the audience an irrational experience which might leave an enduring trace within them. Many shows are little more than political speeches, which I see as pure posturing. Whereas with W.G. Sebald, I have the unique feeling of having found a key. Maybe will it allow me to open a door… if I succeed at doing so, I hope it will allow us to find a path towards understanding the way we’ve lost. Maybe then will we be able to realise we’re not as helpless as we think we are, that there is an alternative to Paul Bereyter’s fate—and that we don’t have to lie on the tracks and wait for the train to come.
Interview conducted by Marie Lobrichon – (translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Zgieb and to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach)