Special envoy to Montpellier
Romeo Castellucci leaves with a disability.
His reputation precedes him, and this prestige presumes that we consider this director as a first-rate artist.
His divisive creations have always been entitled to the reverence of fashionable critics and the more or less silent amazement of spectators.
The Italian visual artist deserves neither the blind praise of the small world of theatergoers nor the spitting of stunned gregarious philistines.
A theatrical creation by Romeo Castellucci with Isabelle Huppert?
“Sublime, necessarily sublime”
, thought the first.
“Let’s go see that
,” dared the seconds.
Result of the races?
Uh…
Castellucci's point of view is never uninteresting.
Here, it is entirely centered on Isabelle-Bérénice Huppert, who, for a little less than two hours, monologues.
On a white veil and in a crackle, the composition of the human body parades: oxygen (60%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), nitrogen (3%), calcium (1.5%), phosphorus ( 1%), etc.
From the start, everything is flawed since, when the play begins, the die is cast.
Before the curtain rises (here the curtain slides elegantly from right to left; superb curtain!), it is already too late.
Then we hear a bell ringing endlessly.
A sort of long trapezoid descends from the hangers.
A frail woman advances, cream lace dress, black cape, crown on the front of the head (costumes by Iris van Herpen): Isabelle-Bérénice all in majesty, queen of Palestine.
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So the show begins in scene IV of act I:
“At last I escape from unwelcome joy…”
Isabelle Huppert's body emerges from her monotone voice.
Racinian poetry becomes, in its throat, plainsong.
Little by little, his words become a river, and his sampled voice takes on a more chaotic appearance.
She drowns herself in an interior monologue, in this deep solitude that she will never stop tinkering with over and over again.
Isabelle devours Bérénice to the cecum, and we have the impressive impression that she sees this solitude written in letters of fire inside her eyelids.
Syntactic abortion
Unfortunately, the viewer becomes detached from this digestion and this vision.
There would be a short circuit.
So, the director tries to find gimmicks.
The actress goes backstage to look for a cast iron radiator.
She drags him to the center of the stage, hugs him, which leaves us neither warm nor cold.
Soon a washing machine appears.
Washing dirty laundry with family?
We're waiting for the iron, the fridge and the microwave.
In the background, a white curtain, on which we see some verses attributed to Titus or Antiochus.
Sometimes, behind the curtain, a group of characters, Chinese shadows, writhe to haunting music by Scott Gibbons, a score that resembles the sounds of a steelworks.
The more the play progresses, the more Isabelle-Bérénice sinks into a kind of autism.
Beautiful scene where she looks at herself in a thick mirror, but immediately spoiled by two sequences which border on farce.
The first: Titus and Antiochus, mute, in an endless choreography.
The second: men (a dozen) - who would represent the Senate -, shirtless, from behind, lower their pants, pull them up, lower them again, pull them up and lower them again to end up completely naked.
For what ?
Whatever the explanation for such symbolism, it would be unconvincing.
Isabelle Huppert is the synecdoche of the art of world theater.
She is the definitive actress
Romeo Castellucci, director
At the end, the actress deconstructs the alexandrine.
The words suffer in his mouth.
We think of a painful parturition or a syntactic abortion.
Then she screams:
“Don’t look at me!
»
while on the white curtain these words are teletexted:
“Isabelle Huppert is the synecdoche of the art of world theater.
She is the definitive actress.
»
We have undoubtedly, mortal sin, captured nothing from this Castellucci-style Bérénice.
Yes, one thing: this genius is sometimes an outstanding alchemist.
He knows how to transform gold into lead.
Bérénice
, at the Théâtre de la Ville (Paris 4th), from March 5 to 28.
Then on tour.