2023-05-09 10:11:10
With Hysteria in 2019, Gérard Watkins had already taken an interest in beings on the margins, staging their illness – and its mysteries – in a center for the treatment of hysteria, relying on the “Tuesday Lessons” of Professor Charcot. Still at the Théâtre de la Tempête, this time it offers an immersion in another singular world, that of hearing voices.
In front of a faded wall pierced by a closed metal shutter, three young people take part in a discussion circle led by a man whom we will not see. Only his voice (that of Gérard Watkins) will reach them and guide them in the story of their respective experiences. Manon (Marie Razafindrakoto), Clément (Malo Martin) and Éloïse (Lucie Epicuréo), three impressively accurate actors, tell how these very real voices constantly dialogue with them and are a source of mistrust and suffering.
Sweet Manon has spent eight years in a psychiatric hospital because she hears the voice of an old woman named Frau, “hot breath” of the grandmother she didn’t have, just like the roar of an earthquake when anger rises.
Éloïse, restless, her body nervous, does not get along with Amandine, this voice which reproaches her for living in a world in disinheritance, makes her responsible for the disappearance of polar bears, bees…
As for Clément, he struggles with a male voice that tells him to do more and more push-ups, shouting at him: “You’re not a cheerleader!” »and another, more friendly, named Schopenhauer…
The voice of the lowing walrus
With the arrival of Véronique, an older woman, played by Valérie Dréville, the show changes. From these nourished exchanges which allowed the three young people to share their upset inner landscape, we move on to an intense, perilous monologue, facing the public.
Véronique wanted to be left alone. She is from another generation, the one on whom silence was imposed, and words do not hatch easily. Magnificent with restrained pain, with terror even in the face of the unspeakable, Valérie Dréville fills the set with her presence, her borrowed body, her sometimes wavering, sometimes carried away voice.
Supported by the invisible speaker, she gropes her way through her story, describing the three voices that harass her, that of the walrus that bellows in her ears, that of a little boy in the woods, of a little girl…
The sensitive portrait of voice hearers
Suddenly the decrepit wall collapses with a loud crash, causing the autumn leaves that dotted the scene to flutter and reveal a raw green forest, garden chairs, a piano, and three fantastic, masked creatures. They represent the three voices of Véronique and all begin to shout, to insult each other in front of an impassive Véronique, as if absent…
We had grown accustomed to entering the imagination of characters on the edge of reality, to following the twists and turns of their thoughts, their suffering, their loneliness, to sharing their fear of having to live under the influence of beings with whom they did not choose to live…
This third and last part breaks with this somewhat mysterious, bewitching atmosphere that had settled over the stories, and that’s a shame. There remains the movingly poetic text, signed by Gérard Watkins (1) and served by four talented actors, and the sensitive portrait, far from any prejudice, of these voice hearers, as a tribute to their profound humanity.
#Voices #screams #whispers