With “Le Voyage dans l’Est” at the National Theater of Strasbourg, an explosion around the hell of incest

2023-11-30 21:00:19
Carla Audebaud, on screen, and Pierre-François Garel, Cécile Brune and Julie Moreau, on stage, in “Le Voyage dans l’Est”, by Christine Angot, adapted and directed by Stanislas Nordey, at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, November 27, 2023. JEAN-LOUIS FERNANDEZ

We doubted neither the intelligence of the director Stanislas Nordey nor the power of the writer Christine Angot, but we were far from imagining the explosion generated by the show associating their two names at the National Theater of Strasbourg. There will be a before and an after The Journey to the East.

Read the interview with Stanislas Nordey (in 2018): Article reserved for our subscribers “The State first subsidizes the spectator”

Published in 2021, by Flammarion, The Journey to the East returns to this incest which obsesses the work of Christine Angot and of which we believed, with supporting readings, to know the essentials. But that was without the masterful staging of Stanislas Nordey, who brings out icebergs of meaning whose existence we never suspected. During the two and a half hours that a performance carried by seven actors and actresses lasts, the realizations follow the obvious. We thought we knew everything? We were wrong.

This movement of revelation has the force of a groundswell which transforms the surface of the waves into a rogue wave from which no one escapes. Starting, undoubtedly, with the novelist herself, whose words echo in a setting of oceanic blue dotted with whitish foam and topped with an immense video screen: fear, shame, sadness, guilt and desperate rage, faced with a wall that she will try so many times to cross.

She wants to have normal relations with her father. “You don’t realize what it’s like to have a father who refuses to let you be his daughter.”, we hear uttered with an insistence which signals the extent to which this paternal denial is a royal road towards trivialized incest. The logic is as revolting as it is unstoppable. Since the father (even if he gives his name in the civil registry) “refuses” that his daughter is his daughter, why, then, would he forbid himself from sleeping with her?

A survival manual

Since Christine Angot has been hammering it in her texts, we should have understood it. We should have noted in capitals, to better engrave it in our heads, that the adolescent under the influence could not escape the relentless mechanisms of sexual, emotional and intellectual predation. Also note how, at 13, she had no other choice but to dissociate internally so as not to lose herself completely. And why The Journey to the East is a survival manual.

A grueling investigation carried out by the writer into the “points of view” which were hers at 15, 20 or 30 years old, and which she invokes by naming them or names by invoking them. Never mind. They are what, in her, resisted the massacre and whom she saves from nothingness by bringing it to light. She doesn’t romance but she reinvents herself. She reclaims herself through and in literature. She becomes a thinking subject, not an objectified victim. “This “journey to the East” is also a journey towards being, again and again, towards reality, again and never”, explained Camille Laurens in The worldwhen the book is released in 2021.

You have 55% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.