Figure navigates through the universe of Francis Bacon, the painter who died in the early 1990s. His reflections on art, his anxieties, his desperate enthusiasm, his fascinations and his quest as touches of colour, compose his portrait played by Denis Lavant. According to director Lukas Hemleb, Denis Lavant is first and foremost “a big reader who writes himself. His research, his personal curiosity make him an actor who is constantly asking questions about the role he is playing. He's like a craftsman who, in order to make his objects also makes the new tools needed to make them. In this case, he has to make a personal exploration of the world of the Irish painter living in London. Pierre Charras' text, a free variation on the personality of Bacon, takes us into the heart of the obsessions which emanate from his paintings.”After his recent success at the Comédie Française with Feydeau's Une Visite Inopportune de Copi et du Dindon, Lukas Hemleb is revisiting a more experimental form. In a pictorial and aural installation rather than a normal stage arrangement, he asks how intimately involved was the artist in his art. “Francis Bacon was someone always close to wounds, to catastrophe. He also had an extraordinary sense of humour. His paintings are hugely vivacious in their forms and colours... He relentlessly led his art and his life to the brink.”
Distribution
stage direction Lukas Hemleb
cast :Denis Lavant and alternately Gianfranco Poddighe, Valéry Volf
scénography and costumes : Jane Joyet
lighting :Philippe Oberson
sound :Frédéric Morier
Production
Production :Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne ETE
en coproduction avec: la Maison de la Culture de Nevers et de la Nièvre