On the plateau of the Cloître des Carmes, beaten by the vigorous mistral which has tossed Avignon since the opening of the festival, the carcass of a house, a construction site of tarpaulins, odds and ends. Construction work or on the contrary demolition in progress? The viewer is quickly fixed. It is with sledgehammers that the occupants – a couple – reveal the plot that is being played out behind the walls, now on the ground, of the pavilion. A man, in a synthetic tracksuit, XVIII shoese and Mapa gloves, is doing the dishes in the middle of the rubble when his partner announces her intention to leave him. She doesn’t really want it but she can’t stand it any longer: she asks for love and dreams while her husband answers her with bills to pay and a clogged siphon.
Without Drum recounts this decay of feelings, a silent and invisible collapse to the rest of the world but a real intimate cataclysm. From the foyer, we will soon slide towards a strange clinic dedicated to broken hearts where the therapists plunge the afflicted into their own tears to free them better… The fragments of this story, to which a third character – Spinel, a neurotic writer – joins weave with excerpts from lieder by Robert Schumann, interpreted on stage by five instrumentalists and the soprano Agathe Peyrat, an unusual and perfectly irresistible patchwork.
Amazing comedians and musicians
The beauty of the music and the depth of the feelings that run through it respond to a willingly schoolboy and totally crazy humor. All in an admirable assembly that is located at the very place of life: on this perilous ridge line between laughter and tears, despair and a saving derision. The public laughs, carried away in an almost childish catharsis, in front of the fall, however predictable, of a (fake) piano, the stormy exchanges of the couple (Sarah Le Picard and Lionel Dray, both impeccable, her with her vindictive logorrhea and him, as a rough-hewn colossus shaken by grief), the slightest actions and gestures of the incredible Léo-Antonin Lutinier, also an opera singer, in the skin of the third character. From the prologue to the sequence by the clinic’s swimming pool, the actor delights the audience with a comic potential full of surprises.
If it is vain to try to classify the work of Samuel Achache (who had co-signed with Jeanne Candel the brilliant deceptive crocodilein 2013) and his company The Deafwe can only thank him for leading us to the heart of this tender, funny and poetic vein, a virtuoso reconciliation of gravity and lightness. Without Drum is one of those shows that we like to make ourselves, against the onslaught of atmospheric and interior winds, a very warm and comforting wrapper.
Until July 13 at the Cloître des Carmes.
Then on November 9 in Meudon, November 16 in Narbonne, from December 1 to 11 at the Saint-Denis TGP, from January 10 to 12, 2023 in Nancy, January 24 and 25 in Pau, February 3 and 4 in Cergy- Pontoise, from February 22 to March 5 at the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris, etc.