2024-01-20 10:23:48
“Tales and Legends”, by and by Joël Pommerat, October 31, 2019 in La Rochelle. ELIZABETH CARECCHIO
Joël Pommerat’s robots are alive and well. Four years after the creation of Tales and legends, the show is repeated at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, in Paris, which has become somewhat of a home for the author and director. Welcoming his creations for many months, this private theater opened Joël Pommerat to a much wider audience, and he became a star. In his own way: resolutely anti-star.
In the meantime, artificial intelligence has insinuated itself more and more into our lives, and the piece has lost none of its power of fascination, quite the contrary. With this masterful show, he flips the spectators like pancakes, between laughter, emotion, confusion and uneasiness, to which we abandon ourselves with incredible pleasure.
To immediately clear up any misunderstanding, we will specify that Tales and legends is in no way a show “about” robots. Certainly, Joël Pommerat here depicts a slightly futuristic world, where humanoid machines are now part of everyday life, particularly that of children and adolescents, for whom they replace absent or failing parents.
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But it is humanity in the current state of its evolution, if that is the word, that it is a question of probing here, with this razor-sharp theater so much on the language – its work on the language of today’s youth is extraordinary – both about situations and acting direction. The author had the idea for this show while he was conducting workshops with young actresses: they play boys, girls and robots equally well, and they are breathtaking in their presence and intensity.
Where did the love go?
These robots embodied by beings of flesh and blood were inspired by Joël Pommerat by the series Real Humans (2012). As in this one, they offer a pleasant appearance, while pulling slightly towards the Playmobil figurine. “You’re so classy!” »said one of the teenagers, at one point, to his friend’s android assistant.
Yes, robots are classy Tales and legends, and not only because they are well-groomed, kind, gentle and considerate. They engage in refined and meditative activities, such as drawing and music. The same will not be said of humanity. As she has programmed herself, she cuts a bad figure: eaten away by immemorial male domination, permanently on the foot of the war of all against all, and braying a power and a courage all the more brandished in standard that they were effectively abandoned.
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