Trilogie Mayenburg: Voir Clair
English Title
Mayenberg Trilogy: Seeing Clearly
Director
Maîa Sandoz
Year
2013-2015
Form
Stage play
Duration
Voir Clair: 55 mins
Duration of the Trilogie Mayenburg: 3h30 minutes (intermission between Voir Clair and Perplexe included)
Synopsis
Julia is looking for work. She accepts to be the cleaning lady of Mr Walter, who lives alone since his wife died, several years ago. Julia then becomes aware of the numerous manias of her new employer: she must tidy up the house without making the least noise, she must not ventilate the apartment, nor even open the curtains, she must cook the same fricassee of veal with mushrooms, every day. And the most important thing: she is totally forbidden to enter the locked bedroom which Walter enters from time to time. Julia adapts to the demands of Walter, motivated by the theft of a necklace, which must surely be hidden somewhere in the apartment. Julia hears strange noises coming from the forbidden room, human groans (?) Which make her more and more curious. When Julia discovers a woman's dress in the basket of dirty linen, she decides to discover Walter's secret. Behind the door hides a blind young woman, Pauline, who waits for Walter, her dad, locked up in her room every day, a dad who would have cracked long ago if she hadn't been sitting in the little bed for 17 years , as if nothing had changed, a dad who disguises himself as a mom, and who plays with his wife's clothes, and together they play with his jewellery. Julia runs away in horror, Pauline and Walter will no doubt be separated.
Adèle’s role
The girl.
Trailer
Notes
Voir Clair (Seeing Clearly) is the second play that was presented as part of the Trilogie Mayenburg by Théâtre de l’Argument, the theatre group founded in 2006 by this play’s director Maîa Sandoz and actor Paul Moulin.
"Voir Clair is a tragedy about blindness, or how we fix reality when we refuse it. Here, we plunge into a more dramatic, darker work, we are totally in the fable, without the narrative distance of Le Moche. A fantastic tale which is not far from the impressive Bluebeard in its dramatic tension, here each one plays his role, a face to face between a man and a woman, an in camera of an extremely disturbing sweetness."
Maîa Sandoz, Director
(Translated from the program)
(Translated from the program)
Another example of community and public engagement: Meet the Artistic Team event after the performance
Meet with Théâtre de l’Argument
[06.02.16 after the performance]
"The artistic team of the Théâtre de l'Argument invites you to stay in the auditorium after the performance on February 6 for an informal meeting around the evening devoted to two plays by Marius von Mayenburg: Le Moche et Perplexe .
The opportunity to share your impressions of the show, ask all the questions that stuck in your head during the performance or simply discover all the creative work carried out by the Théâtre de l'Argument.
THEATRE L'ARGUMENT
L'Argument has existed since 2006. It offers a theatre of actors, riveted to contemporary scriptures and defends demanding, radical and terrifying dramaturgies, a theatre of proximity (physical, political, emotional) by setting up devices that question the relationship to the spectators. The objects created are polymorphic (theatre, performances, cinema, workshop), with a pronounced taste for pieces whose subjects revolve recurrently around illusion, identity, freedom.
Often funny, always relentless texts which allow us to question the process of representation. No a priori vision, but research, excavation, work upstream of a creation inseparable from the life of its members. And on the sets: playful, transvestite, monstrous, ambivalent bodies: Adèle Haenel, Aurélie Verillon, Paul Moulin, Gilles Nicolas, Serge Biavan, Vincent Furic, Celine Pérot, Michel Durantin, Hakim Romatif, James Joint, Mona abdel Hadi, Sinan Bertrand, among others…”
(translated by Google)
I love the commitment to education—both school education & community education— shown by the artists.
Reviews
Reviews for the show are all very positive, praising the selection of the plays, the staging, and the performances. Here is another review.
“Maïa Sandoz had the good idea to bring together three plays by Marius von Mayenburg, playwright associated with the Schaubühne in Berlin, in a triptych on the questions of identity and illusion, which, all independent, enrich each other with this set of mirrors, the abyss of the sets of mirrors installed by Mayenburg. In Le Moche, a scientist, very proud of his invention, is deprived of making the presentation at a conference because it is too ugly and from a marketing point of view, he does not pass. He has no awareness of his ugliness but lets himself be convinced to undergo cosmetic surgery, which makes him dazzlingly beautiful. However, soon after, clones appear around him that make him banal and he dreams only of regaining his initial ugliness. Important detail, from start to finish, is that the faces of the characters remain identical.
In a space of sobriety inversely proportional to the madness of the text (a table, a few chairs, a sofa, green plants, a giant painted canvas representing a mountainous landscape), the four actors each play several roles in a sort of imperceptible slip which takes on delusional proportions in Perplexe. Here, one would think that the writer throws into a hat a handful of situations and characters which, according to a random drawing, combine until the vertigo. A couple returned from vacation receives friends charged with watering their plants in their absence; without warning, the latter take the place of the former, who then take leave; the friend becomes the son, the woman turns into a babysitter, identities are soluble in each other. So in a succession of surrealist glides, Mayenburg puts the myth of Plato's cave into situations, playing with reality that he dismantles as we dismantle the decor at the end of the show. Like the other two pieces, Voir Clair, Modern Blue Beard, unraveling reality, to open doors to reverie, theatrical illusion.
This dizzying whirlwind is brilliantly led by excellent actors, Serge Biavan, Christophe Danvin, Paul Moulin, Aurélie Vérillon and the young Adèle Haenel, César for best actress 2015 for Les Combattants , a doping and original film. She shows a strong personality and deploys comic talents of a beautiful singularity. They form a shock team led with great mastery by Maïa Sandoz in this confusing and hilarious acrobatic exercise of deconstruction of reality.”
(translated by Google translate)
Images from the production
The team relaxing the day before the premier of the Trilogie Mayenburg
Dismantling the set (Feb 2 2015, in preparation for a new season)
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| Taking the show to the regions at a fabulous festival |
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