1993 · La Pluie d’Été · (Summerrain) · Duras · Vigner (EN)

In 1993 Éric Vigner holds a masterclass on MARGUERITE DURAS, at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD), for final-year drama students, the choice of the play is based on Ernesto’s statement in LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ :

This masterclass is a further turning point in Vigner’s life. MARGUERITE DURAS comes to see the performance at the CNSAD Theater. 

"There she is, for the first time, watching a performance of the stage version of her novel La pluie d'été staged by another person - Eric Vigner. She sits there, immobile, her eyes fixed on the scene, seeing only what is happening on stage. She hears the words, phrases, people she knows because she has created, invented them. Sometimes she discovers something new, is astounded. She smiles when there is silence - a silence implied in her writing and reproduced in the interpretation of her text: ‘gentleness - he remembers - silence - he is thinking - His parents watch him as he reflects (silence) - time’ She orchestrates her emotion embodied in the score that comes to life before her eyes. Her forefinger moves, approving, stops, stays immobile in the air, waiting for what is to happen on stage. Perhaps writing is the unreasonable attempt to instil the infinite into the mortality of life. To transfer into space what has been written, then, is the even more unreasonable attempt to make it perceptible in the here and now. From passage to passage, we witness a string of memories which take shape and expand in the poetic space of the production: two characters, two opposites fuse to express their God, their Devil in one and the same word. What strings them together may be a burnt book which comes up again and again in the course of the story. The story of a Jewish king, which Ernesto read at an age when he couldn’t even read. Knowledge before one knows. Things one just knows. Forgotten. Inherited. Something important is said about the awareness of knowledge and ignorance. About the awareness of the Holocaust. About all the kings of Israel, gassed and consumed by flames. About a world that has killed itself. About humankind that has sacrificed, that is to say, sanctified itself. All this is said, and shown, lightly, with a lightness in the sense of suppleness, taking the heaviness off the lamentation. ‘This is no longer the time for lamentation, for getting annoyed behind the scenes. These times are gone.
Lamenting has become useless and undignified’. The question now, the question that we are confronted with, is how to behave in future, how to deal with the future.
Mother: Chemistry is the future, isn’t it ?
Ernesto : No.
Mother : No. (pause) What is the future ?
Ernesto : Tomorrow.
No judgment, nor a lesson in dramaturgy. Just the state of innocence before discourse, before any certainties expressed in words. Nothing is explained. Nothing is explicable. The performance ends with the stage ablaze. With the mystery of the burnt book, the book turned to ashes. She rises, deeply moved. She says, ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps theatre is more powerful than prose."
BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER, MAI 1994

Éric Vigner’s finalised stage version of LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ with HÉLÈNE BABU, MARILÙ BISCIGLIA, ANNE COESENS, THIERRY COLLET, PHILIPPE MÉTRO, JEAN-BAPTISTE SASTRE is presented by the Quartz Theatre at the Stella - an old cinema dating from the fifties at Lambézellec in the environs of Brest - on 25 November 1993 in the presence of MARGUERITE DURAS. Over the next two years, the play goes on tour through France and Russia. It is the beginning of a great friendship between the author and the young director. 

Vigner focuses on the character of Marguerite Duras’ Ernesto, a son of immigrants living at Vitry. Already present in Les Enfants, a film made by Duras in 1984, he is also the main character in La pluie d'été, her story published in 1990. Fragile and unearthly, Ernesto - between his 12th and 20th year - treasures two objects sacred to him: a scorched book and a mythical tree. He refuses to go to school…“because at school they teach me things I don’t know”. A scorched book makes him realise that he can read :

"I discovered La pluie d'été at the Théâtre du Conservatoire. Young student actors were playing and reading the book by Marguerite Duras. An immigrant boy refuses to go to school any longer, telling us under the starry sky how right he was! Then the book falls open - we see the boy’s father and mother, his neighbourhood friends, his teacher, a journalist … and … a serious but funny story turns great drama. Afterwards, I met the director of the play, for the first time. Let me tell you about this first encounter. Eric Vigner loves text. He has an absolute (physical) sense of space. This is exactly what I expect from theatre. This is something I simply don’t want to miss. (…) How does he do it, this Éric Vigner? I don’t know. But I know that this young man can make his actors do anything he wants. For he has the alertness of a wild animal and the eyes of a poet. " 
Jean Audureau (04/07/93)

In LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ, the book that the actors are partly to read and partly to act out, Marguerite Duras depicts Vitry - ’the least literary place one can find’ - as a dreamy dream of a suburb. A place where, in describing a family unconstrained by social convention, the author can play on words as one would jump from stone to stone when crossing a stream, talking about life and time, school, God, journeys and storms. Éric Vigner, closely following the thread of the story, brings to life what Marguerite Duras has created : feelings. 

"It is this injury, which hurts the souls and leaves the bodies intact, that sets the stage literally ablaze at the end of the play, a curtain of flames illuminates the players taking their bows before the fire fighter’s extinguisher takes everyone - actors and audience alike - back into the night of Brest which, this evening, is engulfed by the darkness of the ocean." 
HERVÉ GAUVILLE , Libération, 9 November 1993

© Photography : Alain Fonteray
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient