From studies in plastic art, Eric Vigner went on to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris. In 1990, he and his company, la Compagnie Suzanne M., staged their first production, La Maison d'Os (The House of Bones) de Roland Dubillard in a disused factory in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a Paris suburb. That play outlined Vigner's approach. He followed up with a collective creation Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse. In 1993, he discovered the work of Marguerite Duras with La Pluie d'Eté (Summer Rain) which he directed at the Conservatoire. This project took him on an international tour and a film of it was made.
He directed a number of plays by contemporary authors including Harms, Sarraute, Audureau and Motton, and was appointed director of the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient in 1995. He worked on French classical playwrights Corneille, Hugo, Racine andt Molière while continuing to work with Duras, including a production of her Savannah Bay, which earned her works a place on the repertory list of the Comédie-Française.
In 2004, he worked in Seoul in South Korea, directing actors from the National Theatre there in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which is touring France in 2006.
Éric Vigner stands out because of, on one hand, his choice of writers – all of whom are interested in stylistic experiment – and on the other, his quest to restore the aesthetic to its rightful place in contemporary theatre.
At the Avignon Festival, in 1996 Éric Vigner presented Brancusi contre États-Unis, un procès historique, 1928 (Brancusi vs. The US, an Historic Trial, 1928).
Marguerite Duras was born in what was then called French Indo-China in 1914. She went to France when she was 18 and set to a writing career very soon after, producing a considerable body of work with novels, plays, film scripts and various articles to her name. She invented a narrative style aimed at bringing out the complexity of the human being when dealing with love, death, desire and betrayed childhood, and with herself at the centre of the work, constructing and deconstructing it continually.
She died in March 1996 and ten years later, she features as one of the great authors of the 20th Century, known all over the world.
From Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (A Dam against the Pacific) to L'Amant (The Lover) via La Douleur (The Pain), her works are often insolent or disturbing, but always relevant. Living only for her writing, she nonetheless was very much part of the world around her and fought the causes she though were important.
Eric Vigner invites us on a journey through the writing of Marguerite Duras , more precisely through two works which are among the most representative. It is a journey which results from a long story. When Vigner staged La Pluie d'été at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique à Paris in 1993, the young director met Marguerite Duras who, happy with his work, gave him a gift in the form of permission to stage a film scenario she had written in 1960 for Alain Renais, Hiroshima mon amour. Out of this mutual fidelity was born a wish to present together, two of Duras' works which are both related to cinema.
Between the story of the child, Ernesto, who doesn't want to go to school to be taught things he doesn‘t know, and the story of the woman who goes to Hiroshima after World War Two, these pages are some of the most beautiful that Duras has written and relate to each other like two episodes of one single work.
This entire theatre project is built around ‘intimacy', exposed and transposed by Duras, and the ‘spiritual' via Ernesto who discovers the inexistence of God and the apocalyptic Hiroshima. This new adaptation weaves a tie between both works, from one writing style to another, because this is about writing. Duras' writing leads Vigner's which relies on that of graphic artists M/M, in scenography which plunges you into the author's fascinating words, following their twists and turns. This opposition of one work against another reflect the meeting between ‘Her', the French woman from Nevers whose head was shaved in 1945, and ‘Him', the Japanese man who survived the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima. And who will be played by the famous Japanese actor, Atsuro Watabe. Love between them is impossible, but these two beings, who have lived through exceptional experiences, can still live out desire, and talk to each other, even if it is not easy.
In both works we find mystery, torment, impotence, desire and desires and, in the middle of all that, the question about the existence of God – in fact, all the essential questions that human beings have to ask, written in one language, a language of permanent doubt which never refuses to feel emotions.
Jean-François Perrier
Distribution
adaptation et mise en scène : Éric Vigner
avec : Hélène Babu, Bénédicte Cerutti, Thierry Godard, Nicolas Marchand, Marie Éléonore Pourtois, Thomas Scimeca, Atsuro Watabe, Jutta Johanna Weiss
collaboration artistique : M/M (Paris)
costumes : Paul Quenson
lumières : Joël Hourbeigt
son : Olivier Pédron
maquillage : Soizic Sidoit
assistant à la mise en scène : Nicolas Rouget
assistant à la scénographie : Jérémie Duchier
assistant aux lumières : Rémi Godefroy
Production
Coproduction : CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient Centre dramatique national, Festival d'Avignon