One hundred and fifty meters from Reims train station, on a brick and plaster facade, just above a fitness club that offers "aquabodybike" courses from 5 euros per session, stand out six large white letters and an apostrophe.
L, U, N, I, O, N. There are the headquarters and the editorial office of the first Champagne newspaper.
Journal which organized a big annual fair in the 1960s.
To discover
Theatre: what are the best plays to see in Paris in 2022?
In 1968, reporter Pierre Geoffroy was on the job.
Each year, it is he who is tasked with imagining an attraction to attract the Reims public.
In 1967, he organized a Lilliputiens wrestling match.
Clear success which obliges him to find at least as well the following year.
Geoffroy racks his brains, wants something perfectly absurd, grotesque in the extreme without being completely ridiculous.
Suddenly he has the idea of the century: to organize a women's football match.
His colleagues laugh.
Girls in cleats?
How about the personnel manager in a pleated skirt?
He has some of these ideas, Geoffroy… And the rest of it.
The next day appears in
L'Union
an announcement: “We are looking for young women volunteers to form a team”, or something along those lines.
The following Saturday, to his surprise, several made the trip to the Trois-Fontaines stadium, which has now disappeared.
But it's when Geoffroy sees them kicking the ball that he's most surprised.
They don't play so badly, the buggers, and run fast and aren't afraid to go to a duel.
Obviously, it's a little less funny than he had imagined, but much more interesting.
And almost all of them are determined to make this joke the adventure of their lives.
The Reims team soon becomes the France team.
Pierre Geoffroy, their trainer.
And, ten years later, eleven of these women will win the Club World Cup in Taiwan.
Since then, time has passed and Pierre Geoffroy has passed away.
But her story, authentic as it is, inspired a play by author and director Pauline Bureau.
Not by attraction to sport -
"nothing further from me than football"
-, but by what it symbolizes and those it celebrates: women who have dreamed higher than their dreams, have come out of the straitjacket and of their kitchen, have "transgressed".
Before shooting in the theaters of France,
Feminines
was played last weekend at home, on the stage of the National Dramatic Center of Reims.
In the bleachers, that evening, the pioneers would not have missed this show for anything in the world.
Renée Delahaye, Isabelle Musset and Ghislaine Souef, known as Gigi, their captain:
"Pauline came to meet us in January, she took the time to listen to us and what she did with our little and big story is very strong."
Yet there was cause for concern.
Except perhaps a qualifying match against Moldova, nothing is more boring in principle than a thesis piece, which intends to “sensitize” the spectator as if he were anesthetized from birth, on social determinism and the condition of women.
Here humor and lightness take over.
Gigi was telling the truth, Pauline Bureau did a lot.
And proves that you can do good things with good feelings.
Féminines,
by Pauline Bureau, at
the Théâtre des Quartiers in Ivry, from February 8 to 18 at 8 p.m., Sunday at 4 p.m., closed on Monday
.
Reservations: 01 43 90 11 11 or
reservations@theatre-quartiers-ivry.com
Women
's Tour
on the company's website
