“This morning, I went to see if our theater was still standing…” A cavernous voice rises from a figure hunched over the flickering flame of a candle, the only light from a darkened stage. The theater: this old madman whose most extravagant fabrications often draw the most implacable reflection of reality. Through this preamble that looks like a secret ceremony, the author and director Elsa Granat invites us to visit this thousand-year-old ancestor, to lend an ear to what he has been whispering, tirelessly for millennia, under the veneer of entertainment. .
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On the day of his youngest daughter’s wedding, a man suffers a stroke. When he regains consciousness, suddenly using a phrasing with Elizabethan elegance, he evokes a kingdom to be shared and assures that he will offer the largest piece of it to that of his three daughters who will show him the deepest love. . The diagnosis is in: suffering from a Lewy body disease, he has developed KLS, “King Lear Syndrome”, which plunges him into the greatest dependence, and his children must resolve to place him in an nursing home.
A light despite the pain
Brilliantly intertwining her own writing with excerpts from Shakespeare’s play, Elsa Granat thrusts the audience into the heart of an ontological peregrination of overwhelming acuity. The sadly realistic decor of a common room in nursing homes becomes a hostile moor where the storm that shakes Lear’s brain has nothing to envy to the bad weather that the character wipes away under Shakespeare’s pen.
His companion in misfortune, Gloucester, here a lady with rampant dementia, will never know that his beloved son Edgar will have accompanied him until his last breath. It took audacity to send King Lear to a retirement home, and Elsa Granat is aiming just as this limbo seems to concentrate the springs of the tragedy: the vertigo of senility, the disarray hemmed with guilt of the families and the malaise of the staff. of these establishments.
The scenography follows Lear’s shift, from the colors of the outside and active world to the neutral gray of time suspended on the walls of the institution where an explosively energetic cast bubbles. Bernadette Le Saché, enigmatic guide from the first minutes, operates a striking transformation: irresistible at first as an authoritarian wedding planner, then heartbreaking in Gloucester, amnesia as a form of blindness.
Laurent Huon is a magnificent Lear, shrouded in fragility and mystery. Clara Guipont, she embodies a caregiver between exhaustion and empathy, alongside Antony Cochin, lunar neurologist unable to pronounce the word correctly “degeneration”. If the throats are often tied on a few rises of grief, they are also released in great bursts of laughter. A light despite the pain: the theater of life.
