Late afternoon, a square. Amid the sounds of children playing, two strangers start up a sort of conversation. The weather, domestic routine, good resolutions and bad habits are the subjects which punctuate their exchange. The man and the woman construct their meeting word by word, and experience the intensity of a rare moment of existence. Five years after Le Barrage contre le Pacifique, five years before Hiroshima mon Amour, in 1955, Marguerite Duras wrote this story in dialogue, a portrait of two figures confronted with life, hope, loneliness, death and happiness. Marguerite Duras met Didier Bezace at the beginning of the 1990s just after he had directed Marguerite et le Président, based on her conversations with the late French president François Mitterrand. She was quite taken with the director's work and suggested he should stage one of her works. Didier Bezace has always liked Le Square. It has taken ten years for the project to be realised. He says, “The texts I have directed on stage up until now have nearly all had a common factor - ordinary people - the so-called \'petits' faced with History. Le Square broaches important questions which \'naïve people' ask about the world, about what is crushing them, or what keeps them going.” In 2001, in the Cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace, Didier Bezace directed Molière's l'Ecole des Femmes, this year he is directing Clotilde Mollet and Hervé Pierre in “a work of resistance against the mediocrity of contemporary conversations.”
Distribution
stage direction Didier Bezace
cast: Clotilde Mollet and Hervé Pierre
artistic collaboration :Laurent Caillon
set: Jean Haas
lighting: Marie Nicolas
costumes:Cidalia da Costa
assistant director: Dyssia Loubatière
Production
Coproduction :Théâtre de la Commune-Centre dramatique national d'Aubervilliers, Le Cargo-Maison de la Culture de Grenoble, Théâtre du Muselet-Scène nationale de Châlons-en-Champagne, l'Apostrophe-Scène nationale de Cergy-Pontoise et du Val-d'Oise, Nouveau Théâtre de Besançon-Centre dramatique national, Scène nationale de Sénart
en partenariat avec :La Scène Watteau-Théâtre de Nogent-sur-Marne et Les Estivales de Perpignan
avec le soutien :du Conseil régional d'Ile-de-France
Texte publié par :les éditions Gallimard