"We will laugh and cry," Alexis Michalik had told us. We laughed and cried, sometimes at the same time, touched by this "Love story", his fifth creation. After "the Story bearer", "the Circle of illusionists", "Edmond" and "Intra Muros", Michalik comes to whisper in his ear his ills of love, sweet and hard, funny, impactful, alive and terribly endearing.
It all starts with music. There are five of them, aligned behind standing microphones, and singing the stanzas of "Et yet" by Charles Aznavour. "One fine morning, I know that I will wake up - Unlike every other day - And my heart finally delivered from our love - And yet. And yet ... "
Three women, a child and Michalik who take up the chorus in chorus, "And yet. - However, I love only you - And yet - However, I love only you… ». Like a decompression airlock, a condition, the swaying rhythm song envelops us, we sink into its seat, available for the future.
An incredible sense of rhythm
A phone call throws us into the story that will spin with the fluidity of which it has the secret. Changes of costumes and sets on sight, not a dead time, we go from one place to another in crossfade. A phone call, therefore, and a meeting. That of Katia and Justine, love at first sight. They love each other with passion, decide to have a child…
They each practice an insemination, but it is Katia who becomes pregnant. Insidiously, their relationship will therefore deteriorate. And, just before giving birth, Justine leaves ... Twelve years later, Katia, gravely ill, must find an emergency to whom to entrust her daughter Jeanne. She turns to William, her brother, an alcoholic and depressed writer…
Suffering and laughter
Renewing the stage in a role on the wire, which suits him well, Michalik plays this cynical novelist because he is broken by life. His characters are moreover a little all, damaged. The tenderness of Marie-Camille Soyer (Justine) is matched by the hardness and distress of Juliette Delacroix (Katia), Pauline Bression (Claire) dances and brings lightness and softness. Then there is Jeanne, overwhelming, a twelve-year-old child with mute suffering, opposing adversity with her kindness and innocence. Three young actresses alternate, we saw Violette Guillon, great.
Michalik plays with our feelings, presses where it touches, and sprinkles the emotion it arouses with saving humor. The finger on the cursor, it goes from one to the other, mixes them. Poignant, but without pathos, balanced, the whole is surprising, almost reassuring. Like a love song by Michel Berger, both bright and melancholy, he pushes us to listen to our heartbeat repeat that, really, nothing in the world can replace a few words of love.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: 4.5 / 5
"A Love Story", until March 28 at La Scala (Paris Xe). From 29 to 53 euros (01.40.03.44.30).