2007 · SAVANNAH BAY · Duras · Vigner (EN)
In 2002 VIGNER had presented LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE by Marguerite DURAS at the L’Espace Go in Montréal. He intended the play to form the first part of a diptych the second part of which was to be SAVANNAH BAY, which he directed at the same time at the Comédie-Française. In France, SAVANNAH BAY was all the more important since it was the first time that DURAS was performed at the Comédie-Française. VIGNER felt it was high time for that venerable institution to admit DURAS, whose dramatic work had often been shunned, to the Pantheon of France’s greatest dramatic authors.
"The spectators watching a play by DURAS write their very own intimate history, which belongs to nobody but themselves. This is why the dramatic work of DURAS is poetical theatre, is more than theatre that merely presents one point of view, for example a socio-political one. It encompasses all the various points of view without giving one of them preference over the others."
ÉRIC VIGNER
On September 4, 2007 he re-staged MARGUERITE DURAS’ SAVANNAH BAY with two outstanding actresses from Quebec - FRANÇOISE FAUCHER, a Frenchwoman who had lived in Quebec for more than forty years, and MARIE-FRANCE LAMBERT. VIGNER made the Montreal audience witness the process in which he himself had been locked in the course of an intensive dialogue for years. What he tried to achieve was to make the stage a personal projection screen for the audience.
"DURAS helped me find the kind of theatre that I wanted to make. I discovered a dramatic approach which was new and as yet unexplored, and which presented me with many different options for inventing a theatre of the 21st century. Like everybody else, I had the same misgivings initially, the same prejudices. But then, the confrontation with her œuvre laid the foundations for the kind of theatre I had longed to make. For me, DURAS is a source of everything, a text and a writing process that help me put things on stage."
ÉV
For the set design, see page 2002 SAVANNAH BAY.
© Photography : M. Gelineau Payette
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
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