The good ones
?
A classic tragedy.
The rule of three units is scrupulously respected.
It all begins with distressing music, a Hitchcock-style score.
On the blue stage of Theater 14, topped like a platform, what looks like a bizarre room, outside of time.
On the left, a desk suspended by four ropes, the bust of a statue, an armchair;
at the back, a clothes rack filled with dresses;
on the right, a dressing table.
A woman dressed all in white sits there, putting on her makeup.
A guy in underwear crosses the room, takes a bottle of milk and drinks from the bottle.
He slips away.
A woman in black arrives carrying a bouquet of gladioli and mimosa.
She makes strange grunts.
Her name is Solange.
She's Claire's sister, the lady in white.
They are the good ones, played by Elizabeth Mazev and Stéphanie Pasquet.
The plot is organized around the unexpected release of Monsieur, Madame's lover, denounced to the police by the two sisters.
One of the maids, Claire, disguises herself as Madame during her absence, while Solange plays the role of her own sister.
The two actresses play crazy women who are not so tight;
they make their own cinema, lend themselves, for a time, to the comedy of luxury and power.
The viewer wonders who is who in this waking dream, or rather this nightmare.
Their confinement is entirely internal.
The drama is in them.
The sisters are hardly distinguishable from each other in an almost incestuous relationship.
Let's recognize that the actress who plays Solange (Elizabeth Mazev) is completely extraordinary.
She is the one who leads the dance of death.
Read alsoThe Paradoxes of the actor, the actors return to the school of Diderot
Comico-morbid
Mathieu Touzé's direction is kitsch and multiplies the ambiguities offered on a stage by the admirable classic text of Jean Genet which is respected here to the letter.
The director includes in the play - it was risky - an astonishing and extremely funny choreography to a song by Mylène Farmer
(It's in the air)
and this moment enchants the darkness of the subject.
Just after this performance, Madame arrives, played by the astonishing Yuming Hey, who seems parachuted from another planet.
A young spectator whispers:
“It looks like Chucky!
»
It is true that this actor does not leave you indifferent.
Whether we like it or not, it magnetizes.
The show becomes a fascinating “ceremony”, a long declamatory suicide because if Madame escapes death, Claire, who always doubles herself, will push the game to the end
From this moment, the room takes on another dimension, that of the boulevard, and the stage becomes white as a shroud.
Death lurks: it hides in a cup of linden poisoned with gardenal.
Will the bourgeois lady drink the fatal beverage?
The sisters invent new roles for themselves, always in search of identity.
The show becomes a fascinating
“ceremony”
, a long declamatory suicide because if Madame escapes death, Claire, who always doubles herself, will push the game to the end.
Let us be indebted to the three performers and to the direction of Mathieu Touzé.
They gave these
Maids
back their comico-morbid side.
Not cockroach.
At Théâtre 14, until March 23 then on tour from April 9 to 12.
Such.
: 01 45 45 48 77. www.theatre14.fr
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