“Their children after them”, Nicolas Mathieu’s Goncourt brought on stage by a young company from Annecy

Adapting a novel is a balancing act. How to preserve on stage the spontaneity and the simplicity of the dialogues while embodying the density and the precision of the language of Nicolas Mathieu? The young director Hugo Roux, who signs the adaptation of the novel, has chosen to go back and forth between conversations anchored in everyday life and addresses to the public. The characters are both in the present moment and, each in turn, external witnesses of their own story. The passage from the present to the simple past takes place with fluidity and gives pride of place to the powerful text of the 2018 winner of the Goncourt Prize.

There are the smells of cigarettes, cans of beer, the familiar grain of the road and the dizziness of speed on the father’s bike. Above all, there is idleness and boredom. The lack of perspective of youth trapped in a peripheral town in eastern France marked by deindustrialization. Factories have closed, tired parents have lost their jobs. Between disillusion and depression, they survive as best they can. The time which passes and which stretches to infinity makes them age here twice as fast as elsewhere.

In the suffocating heat of the Lorraine summers, youth suffocate, zone, deale and kill time as best it can. Anthony, Hacine, Stéph and Clém, all dream of “get the hell out” without really knowing the path or the destination. There are those who grow up in the families of local notables and who have some codes. There are the others who are satisfied with potatoes for lunch because the parents count the pennies. All these people rub shoulders for four summers, temporarily freeing themselves from social differences.

A bubbling youth, ready to explode. “Their children following them”, cie “Tomorrow at dawn”. (Yannick Perrin)

Between anger, boredom and desire, the seven actors of the company Tomorrow, at down forcefully embody these teenagers and their horizonless parents, skilfully moving from one character to another. The left bodies of Anthony and Hacine ready to explode (Edouard Sulpice and Adil Mekki in bubbling and revolted young men) and the mothers of families devoured by depression like Hélène, luminous Lauriane Mitchell.

“What I liked regarding Nicolas Mathieu’s novel, testifies the young director Hugo Roux, it is that it shows how economic, social and political systems influence the desires of individuals. “ At 26, this ENSATT graduate is already in his tenth creation and, like all the members of the company Demain from dawn, displays remarkable maturity.

The scenography signed Juliette Desproges testifies with simplicity of these determinisms. As the years go by, walls rise up around the figures and the space shrinks. From one generation to the next, the same constraints that lock up individuals, such as loyalty to their social condition.

Hélène (Lauriane Mitchell) gives herself a day of freedom at the municipal swimming pool (Yannick Perrin)

We enter the room as we turn the pages of the book, gripped by the language and the thickness of the characters, inhabited by complex feelings of having a world to conquer without knowing the tools to achieve it. We come out with strong images: the sensual and brutal melee of Anthony and Steph, the sun on Helene’s skin at the municipal swimming pool, the slow descent into hell of Anthony’s father, consumed by alcohol. .

Created at the Théâtre du Léman in Thonon-les-Bains and scheduled in Aurillac and in two other venues in Haute-Savoie, Their children following them will be performed at the Avignon festival in Theater 11 July 7 to 30, 2022.