2023-10-28 14:57:04
The actor and director spent six months in a ward for patients addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex… He came out with “En addicto”, a solo show but populated by several voices from which it is impossible to pick up.
The director Thomas Quillardet is alone on the stage and we don’t let go of him for a second. It’s rare. An ordinary folding chair, neutral clothes, your own, a silence that lasts unusually after we have settled down. Hey, some latecomers are arriving a little out of breath from having raced up the four floors that lead to the Coupole, this new (and beautiful) performance space in the heights of the Théâtre de la ville. Are they part of the show? Are they average spectators? There we are, we are informed, in the discussion group, and for an hour and a half immersed in an addiction department at the hospital. Invited as part of the partnership that the autumn festival established with the APHP, Thomas Quillardet spent six months in residence there, attending meetings with people at the day hospital who suffer from alcohol dependence , drugs, sex, as well as those of “debriefing” caregivers.
In this department, the director led a theatrical workshop, dreamed out loud of putting on a musical, and why not on roller skates? During these six months, there were euphoric highs and heavy lows that the performance restores with the strength and emotion of the present. The problem is not so much the patients, their appetite for the proposal made to them, or the painful feeling of putting them “in failure”, but the imprint they leave on the director, author, actor. How to get rid of it? Is it even necessary? How can you not dream at night of Ludivine, Olivier, Françoise, Shinzo, Marie-Solène and continue your life as if nothing had happened, once you return home? “You’re part of the care system now.” says a caregiver, that is to say Thomas Quillardet, to the spectators.
“Pathology of abandonment”
Writing that you cannot write is a great classic that has produced the masterpieces that we know. Playing the impossibility of acting, even if it is that of amateur actors, and the dissolution of a project is rarer. But here, the great success of Thomas Quillardet, his captivating and multiplied presence, lies in the way in which he summons a whole small world, shows the links and the feelings, makes caregivers and patients talk, without ever replacing them. In other words, he does not need to resort to mime, or to create fictional and artificial characters to make a crowd of voices heard, to make a space and the essence of an illness, “pathology of abandonment” tangible. explains a psychiatrist. There is a vulnerability in this way of presenting yourself alone on a set, of singing, at the very end, a capela, without any support, the Brazilian hit Delaveraveraboom. But above all an art of balancing in this way of operating by successive shifts, without ever highlighting the always provisional identity of the narrator.
We could get lost there, that’s not the case. We are suspended on this line, a few clues, the first names, the tone, are enough for clarity. A poignant emotion is struck when we understand that it is not the project of a show which is falling apart, but the entire service, suddenly put on the street, patients and caregivers in the same boat which is sinking, due to lack of resources. . “I am not an actor” Thomas Quillardet clarifies several times to his interlocutors. He is wrong or deceiving them. Other artists – Fanny de Chaillé, Samuel Achache, Emilie Rousset – are participating or will participate in these long-term actions in different departments of the APHP, imagined by the autumn festival during the health crisis. The specificity of the gesture is that it is not subject to the obligation to ultimately present a show.
En addicto of and by Thomas Quillardet with the artistic collaboration of Jeanne Candel at the Théâtre de la Ville until October 28, then in Cachan on November 15 and 16, in Cherbourg, on December 7 and 8, in Villeneuve d’Ascq on the 24 , January 25, 26, at the Aquarium theater (Paris) from March 8 to 10, from April 2 to 5 in Saint-Quentin en Yveline, from April 9 to 11 in Angoulême.
#Thomas #Quillardet #addiction #Libération