Born in Lebanon in 1968, Wajdi Mouawad, at the age of 8, was forced to abandon his native land because of the civil war and began an exile that led him to France. He was obliged, however, to leave France in 1983 because the state refused to give him the papers required to remain in the country, and he left for Quebec. He went to school there and in 1991 received his diploma from the National Theatre School of Montreal. A writer and director, he founded his first company Théâtre Ô Parleur, then, in 2000, he became the artistic director of the Théâtre de Quat'sous before setting up the first French-Quebec company, Abé carré cé carré / Au carré de l'hypothénuse. Staging his own texts Littoral, Willy Protagoras enfermé dans les toilettes (Willy Protagoras, Shut up in the Lavatory), Rêves (Dreams), Incendies (Fires) and in 2006 Forêts (Forests), he also became interested in Shakespeare (Macbeth), Cervantes (Don Quixote), Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting), Sophocles (The Trojans), Frank Wedekind (Lulu), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Chekhov (The Three Sisters) and Louise Bombardier (Ma mère chien [My Mother Dog]). Since 2007, he has been artistic director of the French Theatre of the National Arts Centre of Ottawa. Working on both sides of the Atlantic, he brings many producers in France and Canada into his project, mobilizing French and Canadian actors. He produces unique works that he says do not consist “in putting something on stage but in putting something in the mind”, directing “the actors to bring them to a state of mind that is specific to them and also specific to the show in which they act, to contaminate the spectators”.
Wajdi Mouawad presented Littoral at the Festival d'Avignon in 1999.
Is it Wajdi Mouawad who undertakes, alone on the stage, a journey into his unconscious, in quest of his most deeply buried desires, in quest of the child he once was and whose image has been effaced, in quest of a forgotten mother tongue? Yes and no… because the author-director-actor throws us off the scent and makes himself the master of true-lying, novelized autobiography, theatre self-fiction, using dramatic turns of events to better shed light on the complexity of his thought processes. Based on the principle “I is another”, he puts together a journey full of adventures, alternating epic moments full of humour and tragic episodes, a journey in the present into a past concealed deep within the unconscious that suddenly unmasks itself. In this complex and rich itinerary, the hero is “Seuls”, simultaneously and concurrently a prodigal son, a blocked writer, an evolving artist, a child knocked about. Using the maximum polymorphy and polyphony that the theatre permits, mixing text, music, video and lighting, Wajdi Mouawad composes this living portrait of a man who touches and moves us with his questioning, his anguish, his incapacities, his desires, his wish to understand and assume his relationship with the world by releasing himself from his conscious or unconscious mental blocks. By going as deeply as possible into himself, by exposing himself without any false modesty, he touches the universality of human destiny. The uncontested master of the stage that he transforms into an artist's studio, organizing a permanent game of hide-and-seek, not rejecting extreme simplicity while daring extreme complexity, not trying to explain but trying to feel, Wajdi Mouawad knows how to light the invisible that is hidden in each individual, becoming one of the great contemporary poets of human pain and suffering.
Distribution
texte, mise en scène et jeu: Wajdi Mouawad
dramaturgie et écriture de thèse: Charlotte Farcet
conseiller artistique: François Ismert
assistante à la mise en scène: Irène Afker
scénographie: Emmanuel Clolus
éclairage: Éric Champoux
costumes: Isabelle Larivière
réalisation sonore: Michel Maurer
musique originale: Michael Jon Fink
réalisation vidéo: Dominique Daviet
direction de production: Anne Lorraine Vigouroux
texte à paraître aux éditions Actes Sud-Papiers
Production
un spectacle: d'Au Carré de l'Hypoténuse, compagnie de création
production déléguée Espace Malraux -Scène nationale de Chambéry
et de la Savoie
en coproduction: avec le Grand T -Scène conventionnée Loire-Atlantique,
le Théâtre 71 Scène nationale de Malakoff, La Comédie de Clermont-
Ferrand Scène nationale, le Théâtre national de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées,
le Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui, Montréal
Wajdi Mouawad est artiste associé à l'Espace Malraux -Scène nationale
de Chambéry et de la Savoie