Intérieur

“It speaks of this other invisible life, in a visible way,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to sum up Interior. After first directing it in 1985, Claude Régy has accepted to work on Maeterlinck's play again with Japanese actors at the request of Satoshi Miyagi, director of the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. The play, which pioneered a new form of theatre, revolves around two spaces facing each other: a house inside which we can see, without hearing what is being said, a family gathered for the evening, and in front of the house, a lawn on which congregate a funeral procession led by two men, the Old Man and the Stranger, who carry the body of a drowned young girl. Those two characters, much like the messengers of Greek tragedies, come to tell the family what has happened; soon they are talking about what is happening inside the house, and about what is likely to happen when they open the door to tell the family about the death of the girl. They become intermediaries between the audience and the house. Claude Régy, by working with Japanese actors, intends to continue his research on performance. He wants us to hear the power of silence, which he considers another form of language, and of those parallel dialogues, what he calls “the furrows of the text,” in order to go beyond what can be heard, beyond our first understanding of the words, to find what is hiding behind them. To flee realism and bombastic speeches to unveil this invisible Rilke mentions, to finally see “existence itself.”

Admired by Vsevolod Meyehold, Constantin Stanislavski, and Antonin Artaud, who all saw in him a true revolutionary, Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, was the author of about forty plays which, between 1889 and 1948, deeply changed dramatic writing. Interior, published in 1894, is part of a cycle of plays intended for marionettes. Part of the Symbolist movement, like his masterpiece Pelléas and Mélisande, it is also part of what Maeterlinck called “the tragic in daily life”, of a theatre that tries to show what cannot be shown, “all that has no expression in death or in life, everything that seeks a voice in a heart.”

Jean-François Perrier, April 2014

Japanese text Yoshiji Yokoyama
Direction Claude Régy
Direction assistant Alexandre Barry
Scenography Sallahdyn Khatir
Light Rémi Godfroy
Costumes Sallahdyn Khatir et Mai Ooka

Assistant  and performer for the artistic team Hiromi Asai
Technical direction Sallahdyn Khatir
Light for the european tour Pierre Gaillardot
Dresser Makiko Tango
Administration of production Bertrand Krill

With
Soichiro Yoshiue Le Vieillard
Yoji Izumi L'Étranger
Asuka Fuse Marie
Miki Takii Marthe
Tsuyoshi Kijima Le Père
Haruyo Suzuki La Mère
Kaori Ibii, Mana Yumii Les Deux Filles
Gentaro Shimofusa Un Paysan
Hiroko Matsuda, Yusuke Oba La Foule
Hibiki Sekine et Yumeji Matsunaga (en alternance) L'Enfant

Production Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, Les Ateliers Contemporains
Coproduction tournée 2014 Wiener Festwochen, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Festival d'Automne à Paris
Avec le soutien de l'Institut français (théâtre export)
Avec l'aide de Van Cleef & Arpels La compagnie des Ateliers Contemporains est subventionnée par le ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction Générale de la Création Artistique