A “miraculous” adaptation

Being interested since my university studies in philosophy and mysticism, I was literally seized in 2008 by the new translation of the Confessions by Frédéric Boyer. This new "writing over Augustine" made me feel like a palimpsest over the original Latin text. Appeared to me the itinerary of a thought of and for my time, poetic and violent, inhabited by all brutality, by all provocations, "mystically incorrect" but also steeped in love, a demanding, superhuman love " The measure of love is to love without measure ". An invigorating, trying, overwhelming reading ... which in spite of everything did not whisper to me the idea of ​​imagining an adaptation of it for the scene: too thick, too protean, too proselyte too.

It was without counting on the spirit "which blows where it wants, when it wants" we say: here in 2014, Martine Loriau, obstinate reader of great mystical texts, and creator of spiritually cultural events came to see at Théâtre Les Déchargeurs At Marianne's banquet in which I played, among other things, an exalted, sensual and gourmet Jean Jaurès. Martine made a link between HIS Augustin and MON Jaurès. She submits to me her adaptation of the Confessions, the fruit of insatiable re-readings, of a scholarly knowledge of the character and the historical-theological context of the first centuries of Christianity, before the secular triumph of the Church and the temptations of temporal powers.

What she had learned from Frédéric Boyer's text, the way she had recomposed it, immediately convinced me. She had found the right point of view, and from there, its essence, its very theatrical necessity: that of the trajectory, annoyed and yet inevitable, of a young intellectual enjoyer towards the revelation of faith. Where it is no longer a question of believing, but of receiving. She had known, not without humor, in shadows and light the enjoyable masochism of the one who burns what he adored and adores what he burned. She had been able to reconstruct a kind of entirely internal investigation, like a thrilling thriller in which everyone (Augustine and God) distributes drama… to the theater!

In search of ever more efficiency and theatrical relevance, we continued together to work on adaptation, to lead to the one we are offering you today.

Dominique Touze

A pair of actor and musician

Here is the man !

By a minimalist staging (but all in details); in a scenography suggesting with simplicity and poetry the plural metaphor of the tribunal of men, of the pulpit of the preacher and of the intimate and secret ritual of a confession (in turn intellectual, psychoanalytic and metaphysical); by playing on the double etymological origin of the word AVEU of advocare (to call near oneself) and confiteor (to confess a fault); the dramatic objective here is to show the man rather than the saint: the complicated, ambiguous but redemptive route of the one who questions, with sincerity and without taboo, the drift of desire, the vanity of passions, but who does not hesitate not to remember the Garden of Delights with joy, gluttony and sensuality.

It is a question here of making the spectator experience / share how much the Revelation can be inscribed in the flesh… and transfigure it; because "if all the saints have a past all fishermen have a future. "

From the Bach snapshot to the oriental arabesques

he actor is supported here by a musician, as Augustine is supported by God. The music (who can best say the inexpressible) accompanies, dialogues, whispers, supports, gets angry (and also laughs), breathes to the protagonist what he should hear, if not understand: "When you listen to what I tell you say, and listen to what you tell me, where do we hear it? It is neither in you nor in me, but in another intelligence. "

The musician is therefore an angelic metaphor for God. A young, beautiful and sensual God. An uncompromising God of love who turns you over like a pancake (flip over) or rather like a glove (the inside becoming the outside, raw). A god of infinite compassion, placing himself at the finite height of man, a god who is an accomplice (and not a judge) who, at the end of the story, will take on the appearance of the Pontician friend, the trigger for the famous conversion into solitude of a small Milanese garden.

To interpret his musical creation, Guillaume Bongiraud will alternate with Clémence Baillot d'Estivaux.

Pratical information

from 02/02/2017 to 01/04/2017
released on February 16

The Unloaders Theater
3, unloaders street
75001 Paris
Métro Châtelet

www.lesdechargeurs.fr

La bohème room
Duration: 1h05

Thursday & Friday: 21 p.m.
Saturday: 17 p.m.