Au revoir (Goodbye)

They didn't come together specifically for this show, and that's what makes it so interesting. After meeting while shooting a film by the Larrieu brothers, Antoine Jaccoud and Mathieu Amalric soon became friends and admirers of each other's work. And so the playwright and screenwriter gives the actor a monologue he wrote specifically for him. The monologue of a father saying goodbye to his children, who have left for Mars. “Farewell,” they said on the tarmac, but will they ever see each other again? With lucid tenderness, Antoine Jaccoud turns the intimate goodbye of a father to his sons into a most political declaration. A goodbye to this constant human desire to change the world, now replaced by the illusion of conquering new worlds—and thus abandoning the old one.

Antoine Jaccoud has written for the cinema, the theatre, and for any and all medium which uses oral expression. He has co-written films by Ursula Meier (L'enfant d'en  haut, Journal de ma tête, Home), Bruno Deville (Bouboule) and Bettina Oberli (Le vent tourne). Onstage, he's given voice to Lolo Ferrari's husband (Ferrari), to the last peasant in the world in On liquid, or said goodbye to animals in his “zoophile's monologue,” created at the Théâtre de Vidy-Lausanne in 2017 with Jean-Yves Ruf. Antoine Jaccoud has also performed in Switzerland and abroad with the authors and musicians of the spoken word group “Bern ist überall”, or as a duo with musicians Christian Brantschen or Sara Oswald. Au revoir, created in 2017 with and for Mathieu Amalric, is his most recent monologue. The actor and author also appeared together in Stéphane Goël's documentary Insulaires, released last March, for which he wrote the narration.

The text of Antoine Jaccoud's Au revoir is published by BSN presse (Lausanne).

Text  Antoine Jaccoud
Direction Pascal Deux
Reading Mathieu Amalric

Co-production France Culture / Sélection suisse en Avignon / Centre culturel suisse. Paris
In partnership with Festival d'Avignon - impulsion La Fureur de lire – Genève