2023-07-15 18:00:07
Gwendoline Gauthier, at the Théâtre de Poche in Brussels, April 10, 2023. LARA HERBINIA
Gwendoline Gauthier has the gift of metamorphosis. When you meet the actress, it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast between Effie, the heartbreaking character of rage and fury that she embodies in Iphigenia at Splott − a must-see show at the Avignon “off” Festival − and the radiant thirty-year-old, with turquoise blue eyes, beautiful red hair and wearing a little light blue dress with a white collar. Antonin Artaud wrote that the actor is a “emotional athlete”. Gwendoline Gauthier perfectly embodies this definition.
To slip into Effie’s shoes and defend with stunning energy this girl from Splott, an underprivileged district of Cardiff (Wales) hit by deindustrialisation, where life is a struggle, where alcohol is the only crutch, she prepares herself every day physically – by respecting a strict lifestyle – and emotionally. “I read the newspaper every morning. The news makes me angry, it pushes me into a dynamic”explains this former student of the school of actors at the Royal Conservatory of Liège (Belgium).
As the audience settles in, she is already at the back of the stage, her hands in the pockets of her tracksuit, a cap screwed on her head. She paces like a boxer waiting for a fight. Three musicians, who will magnificently accompany this rock tragedy, have taken their place on the stage lined with a thin white luminous garland. Effie appears as if on a ring to balance her story.
“An American utopia”
That of a lost person who gets drunk in bars, whom no one dares to look at, who seethes with anger against injustice, who can no longer take the consequences of a system that abandons the invisible. A meeting will change his life. And as in the films of Ken Loach, political choices of austerity will come to strike his destiny.
When the director of the Théâtre de Poche in Brussels had Gwendoline Gauthier read this shocking and breathtaking text by the Welsh playwright Gary Owen, a thrilling tale of a sacrificed by society, she “worked like crazy” to pass the audition. “I was overwhelmed by this story, by the need for the public to hear it. Because we do not measure to what extent politics has concrete consequences on people’s lives. » Retained by the stage director Georges Lini, the actress chose to carry out an almost cinematographic work. She left for a fortnight in Cardiff to put images to words. “I walked in all the places described by Gary Owen, I took the same routes as Effie and I learned a lot of my text there. »
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