2023-12-04 20:29:12
Her face appears in a cloud of smoke, to the sound of electro music which shakes the bodies all around her. From the outset, the camera catches her tall figure and her somewhat lost air, searching for her through the crowd of dancers. Rosa Lembeck, wonderful actress from the German Volksbühne company, will be our guide in the roaming imagined by Julien Gosselin to tell the story of the end of the world. It is up to him to have the delicate mission of linking the three scenes of the show Extinction which will follow one another for almost five hours.
The first therefore immerses the public, invited to go on stage, into an electro concert. Everything is moving from then on, and nothing seems to resist dissolution in the sound that soon resonates in each chest: the bodies, the camera that follows them, the language that constantly oscillates between French and German. The place of the spectators too, dancing on stage or sitting in the room, their eyes glued to the screens which diffract the shots and follow the actors backstage.
Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna
This play on the visible and the invisible remains at the center of the second painting, whose meticulous decor is then established, that of a 1900 villa in the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler, at the time of this joyful Apocalypse which brings together in the capital Austrian intellectuals and artists. In these rushes at the end of the world, the French and German actors respond to each other with a fluidity and an intensity nourished by the mixture of languages and, at a tempo which continues to accelerate, survey the lands of the grotesque as well as the tragic with the same ease.
Here again, it is cameras – whose handling is astonishingly mastery – which reveal to us the interior scenes, of parties and massacres. Black and white images which depict a refined and carefree Europe, where catastrophe is imminent.
Rosa Lembek is there again to lead us, from this piece in which she is the spectator to the third and final painting which gives its name to the show. Long monologue by Thomas Bernhard that she sends from a simple platform, part of the audience seated around her.
Thomas Bernhard’s long monologue
A text sharp as a blade, which suddenly erupts like the telegram which has just announced the death of parents, and dissects the extinction of a culture, of a country, of a family.
The face of Rosa Lembeck again, whose profile appears on the screens, welcomes all the emotions of pain, disgust and joyful rage, while everything collapses. As she opened it, she brought this triptych, sometimes a little demonstrative, to a masterful end.
Until December 6 at the Théâtre de la Ville, then on tour to Berlin and Luxembourg.
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