It might be a story like thousands of others with a beginning in the guise of a romantic comedy: love at first sight in the queue at an airport and love, the big one, which suddenly opens the horizon, increases the field of possibilities. She didn’t really know what to do with her skin and had decided to travel a little between two “shitty jobs”.
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When she meets her husband, everything changes: “He gave me confidence”, she says. She launched out, landed the job of her dreams and then successfully set up her own company. She succeeds. Too much perhaps for him to be able to bear it when his own projects are collapsing. Gradually, the love fades away, buried by other darker feelings, and when she finally leaves home with their two children, he will plot the most appalling revenge.
A wonderful character
“I know they are not there”, breathes the woman to the audience while she replays some fragments of memories with her daughter and her son. We will not know her first name, only that she lives in England but she might be from anywhere else. Unfolding this tale of banality that tips over into the unimaginable, the monologue by Briton Dennis Kelly forcefully deciphers the mechanics of violence in the intimate sphere.
He also delivers, and above all, a poignant portrait of a woman. For 1 hour 40 minutes with a dazzling presence, Bénédicte Cerutti embodies this endearing personality endowed with a biting humor and a popular banter full of swear words. Deploying, with total control, a wide range of emotions, she surreptitiously makes the audience slide from laughter to tears. The staging by Chloé Dabert, director of the Comédie de Reims, also plays on a delicate keyboard, making fine use of music, light and a few parsimonious decorative elements, revealed behind movable panels over the stages of narration.
The subtlety of the scenography, like that of the rhythm instilled in the piece, leaves plenty of room for this text carried by the intensity of Bénédicte Cerutti’s playing. Suspended by each of his words, his silences and his looks, sometimes sucked in by some ghost, sometimes directly pointed at him, the public will obviously not come out unscathed from this plunge closer to horror.
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