Oui dit le très jeune homme (Yes is for a very young man)

Ludovic Lagarde, a man who has directed the works of Brecht, Bond and Chekhov, wanted to do theatre to learn to read literary texts. Olivier Cadiot, author of a book of poetry intermingled with a novel and published by P.O.L, a work-mate of music composers (Georges Aperghis, Pascal Dusapin and Benoît Delbecq), translator of the Song of Songs and the biblical Psalms, author of lyrics (for Kat Onoma, Rodolphe Burger and Alain Bashung), sometimes comes on stage to read from his works. The two men met in a bar, just as the laws of need and chance would have it. Olivier Cadiot watched Samuel Beckett's Trois Dramaticules (A piece of Monologue, That Time and Ohio Impromtu), directed by Ludovic Lagarde, who discovered \'Poetic Art', a poetical explosion and exploration by Olivier Cadiot who in his particular way, developed the \'cut-up', a way of “taking samples of reality and re-arranging them” from grammar books. Their working partnership materialized with Le Colonel des Zouaves (1997), and continued with the stage production of Retour Définitif et Durable de L'Être Aimé (The Final and Lasting Return of the Loved One) (2002). Their latest joint effort, has generated two new plays, and these with another performance of Le Colonel des Zouaves, played alternately throughout the Festival, are the fruit of three months in residence at the Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon.



Yes is for a very young man

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), the paragon of avant-garde art in the 1930s and inventor of the repetitive style, spent the Second World War in the country-side, in a village in the French Alps of Savoy, with her companion and secretary Alice B. Toklas at her side. A Jewess, not in exile –and not deported either - Gertrude Stein continuously took notes on the shame felt at defeat, the drift towards collaboration, like that of Field Marshall Pétain, the commitment of the Resistance, the erring ways and hesitations of the people. From this particular experience was born her penultimate play, Yes is for a Very Young Man (1944-45), a play rediscovered and directed by Ludovic Lagarde, translated by Olivier Cadiot. From the Armistice until the Liberation, figures in the human comedy that was Occupied France, take up their positions in the garden of Denise, a French woman who supports Pétain, in Constance's living room, Ferdinand's questions, “Can we choose our side when we are all in prison?” Somewhere in between Bertolt Brecht's He Said Yes/He Said No and Nathalie Sarraute's Pour un oui ou pour un Non (For a Yes or for a No – It doesn't take much...), between a didactic play and a piece of academic research, Gertrude Stein produced a surprising work in which we discover the novelist of a “lost generation”, a bench-mark for contemporary writing, a sort of Balzac plunged into the debacle. The play is staged as a musical without music and Olivier Cadiot and Ludovic Lagarde have found one of the conditions for the possibility of “committed art”, in which the form of the text itself creates the effect of reality, amplified and exposed by the theatre.

translation Olivier Cadiot
stage direction Ludovic Lagarde
cast : Pierre Baux, Sophie Gueydon, Antoine Herniotte, Claire Longchamp, Camille Panonacle, Laurent Poitrenaux, Christelle Tual
dramaturg : Pierre Kuentz
lighting : Sébastien Michaud
costumes : Virginie et Jean-Jacques Weil
sound : David Bichindaritz
scenography : Ludovic Lagarde et Antoine Vasseur
assistant director : Claire Longchamp

coproduction : Nouveau Théâtre d'Angers - Centre dramatique national - Pays de la Loire, Le Théâtre du Gymnase - Marseille, Festival d'Avignon, Centre national des Écritures du spectacle - La Chartreuse de Villeneuve lez Avignon, Compagnie Ludovic Lagarde
avec la participation artistique : du jeune théâtre national