2003 · ”... Où boivent les vaches.” · Dubillard · Vigner (EN)
VIGNER maintains a special relationship with the two authors of his beginnings, MARGUERITE DURAS and ROLAND DUBILLARD. After the diptych devoted to DURAS, the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris recruited him for the Dubillard Festival.
On 7 October 2003, he opened the first season of the CDDB at the newly constructed Grand Théâtre in Lorient with " …OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES." ("...Where the cows drink.") by ROLAND DUBILLARD, before the piece is presented in Paris in April 2004.
For his production Eric Vigner assembles a family of actors the majority of whom had already worked with him before: HÉLÈNE BABU (LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ), JEAN-DAMIEN BARBIN (RHINOCÉROS and LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE), PIERRE GÉRARD (LA PLACE ROYALE), JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS (MARION DE LORME, RHINOCÉROS and LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE). Four more actors join the ‘Vigner family’: MICHA LESCOT in the part of Félix, the leading role formerly played by DUBILLARD himself, MARC SUSINI, JEAN-PHILIPPE VIDAL and THIERRY GODARD.
"It was by chance that I entered the house of ROLAND DUBILLARD at the end of adolescence, through the back door, and I stayed there. I first hit upon it in Brittany, at the regional Conservatoire. Two friends of mine were presenting a scene from LA MAISON D'OS - I didn’t understand a thing. Intrigued, fascinated, I set to work on it for my entrance exam for the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique de Paris. In due course this fascination became something of an obsession, so I wanted to graduate with it from the Paris Conservatoire. A few years later, when I was about to grow into a man who had not forgotten his childhood and its playgrounds but who showed his desire without giving in to it, it came back to my mind - it had been there all the time. It had not been visited for some thirty years, but then this very young theatre company SUZANNE M. decided to move in and make this masterpiece of dramatic literature of the second half of the 20th century their territory. SUZANNE M. had taken for its motto DUBILLARD’s liberating watchword - ‘It is better to say what you want than what you are expected to say, or else I’ll keep quiet. The choice is yours.’- the motto that had presided over the creation of his MAISON D’OS. This text presented itself to us as the material which would lay the foundations of the new theatre we were intent on constructing: A poetic manifesto of our intention to invent the future by means of theatre. On opening the book one is forced to dive deep down into one’s self. Either we understand DUBILLARD or we don’t, there is no explaining, we understand it as we feel it, it does not lend itself to analytical reduction, it takes fully hold of you or not at all. I had the same feeling with DURAS, and I had the great fortune to meet them both, in the flesh. It’s a question of family - there’s the DUBILLARD family and there is the DURAS family, or rather: there’s an irreversible, lasting, immediate and profoundly intimate attachment to the work and the nature of his (personal) relationship with the world; an attachment which moves forward by links: DUBILLARD before the Internet, with feelings progressing by leaps, by fragments, by bits of memory and feelings, clashes, gridlocks; there is no defined logic governing the work at the beginning, there’s only a feeling that gives rise to the need to write, a flow, no programmed end, a coming and going no matter whence and where, a wealth of exemplary and autonomous points that end up forming a whole, as one would say of the multi-facetted eye of a fly. DUBILLARD’s work artistically initiates an entire life, mine in particular, but also the lives of the children of the house, those who know today that to act is a game, those who have not forgotten the gardens of childhood."
ÉRIC VIGNER
"It is ROLAND DUBILLARD’s second masterpiece, after LA MAISON D'OS. A tragicomedy about art, and also about the art of living - the art of being human. This could be what l’ILLUSION COMIQUE is to CORNEILLE's work or THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS to PIRANDELLO's, a fantasy where questions about existence and the necessity of art are mingled in a remarkable, nonconformist writing, which has no equivalent today: a rarity, a treasure. Created in 1972 in Paris for the Autumn Festival by the Renaud-Barrault company, with a prestigious cast including ROLAND DUBILLARD himself, and directed by ROGER BLIN; " ...OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES." was revived in 1983 at the TNP by ROGER PLANCHON. For twenty years this drollery had been unjustly absent from theaters."
ÉV
"I can't write. I've got writer's cramp. Your ballet, your movie, your exploding goats, I don't know, your play, write it yourself. I'm not a pen, or if I'm a pen, take me in hand. I'm not going to lift a finger. It's now, it's right now that I want something to happen, not next season in a theater. Which one? A subsidised one if possible." [1]
"« …OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES. » is my most significant work. It deals with a poet’s doubts who understands that fame is a fake, rigged by the world and civilisation, by his mother, his son, his wife, all the academies. The poet tries to flee this world. Whether town or country, it’s all the same trickery. The title is taken from Rimbaud, and it is meant to say, ‘there is no escape, I’m always there’. It is a piece about water that flows, like life."
Roland Dubillard
"No! - I wasn’t born. I have no memory of it. All the things they tell me - nothing at all. In a certain place - no! I wasn’t born in any place: a grotto, a house - no! Not at any date - no! What counts for me is ‘now’. I am. Voilà. Look at me. Here and now. Have you seen me? Make the best of it. I wasn’t born, I am here. If that doesn’t interest you, you can always go away. If you don’t like it, tell me." [1]
© Photography : Alain Fonteray
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
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