2012 · La Faculté (EN) · Honoré · Vigner
La Faculté is the third part of a trilogy about youth and freedom, written for the young actors of the Académie who are in quest of the matter from which a Theatre of Babel can be built, in bodily contact with the diversity of languages they are trying to come to grips with. The question will always be how the effort to reduce the gap, the differences - human, linguistic, in art, history and social makeup - in a given place and time may create settings where the mind and imagination may circulate freely in unexpected ways.
After Corneille's La Place Royale and Guantanamo by Frank Smith, Éric Vigner produces La Faculté, written, especially for the Académie, by the cinéaste and author Christophe Honoré. For the performance at the Festival of Avignon in July 2012 Vigner has chosen an unusual location, the courtyard of the Lycée Mistral.
The action takes place on the campus of a French university. One evening, a crime is committed - a student is murdered. Is it a racist crime, gangsters settling an account, a homophobic crime? La Faculté raises questions about sexual identity, about being different, about a difference so shocking that it provokes a deed that can no longer be undone.
"Vigner's position is in fact an extension of the way Honoré launches his words from the banks of realism and allows them to be swept away by the tide. Not a trace of naturalism - not in the action nor in the costumes; indeed, the lads look as though they had just stepped out of a photo by Bernard Faucon. And certainly not in the set design: a plain of fine sand that invades the city streets and turns its trees and street lamps into a moonscape, enveloping the whole play in a cloud of oneirism. Everything fits perfectly together."
Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, Rue 89
It is a contemporary tragedy that harks back to the themes of Antique tragedy: sacrificial murders, banishment, family strife, siblings in crisis, the impossibility of love, destiny, secrets, the forbidden, transgression ... A kind of outcry of youth which explodes silently in a highly particular atmosphere compounded by night and snow, strangely sombre and at the same time luminous.
"The amorous élan that moves the young people in La Faculté might well be considered romantic, hugoesque, since it is what results in death. Basically, we always talk of one and the same thing..."
ÉRIC VIGNER
"Ahmed : He wanted to take off all my clothes and I wanted him to close the window but he said no because of the snow he wanted to watch as it fell during the night. And he opened the windows so that my skin would turn pink, a cold sort of pink, magenta he called it. (...) I was stark naked and I talked to the snow - about something quite different, I talked about riders. I laughed, I shouted all sorts of things at the snow, quite relaxed. I was high when I got to his place. The riders, the snow like a permanent army, everything turning, going round and round..." [1]
"Ahmed lives - strangely - without a family, without any visible connection with anyone. This is what awakens his desire, what drives him, what constitutes his visionary side. Ahmed "sees", he is a kind of seeing Rimbaud who loves artificial paradises. The riders overcome him like a vision, an intimation, of his own death. Ahmed knows he is about to die. I'm thinking of Claude Simon, the cavalcade forcing its way through the snow in Les Géorgiques. Ahmed possesses the sureness of a poet, he gives colour to the snow. He is a painter, an inventor of images and colours, who - like Rimbaud in his reflexion on the creativeness of the Poet - wants "to be seeing, to make himself see. The poet makes himself see through a long, immense but reasoned deregulation of all his senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he seeks himself, he extracts all the poisons from his body, leaving only the quintessence." [2]
Sabine Quiriconi
"Claude Simon describes winter as an active principle that makes itself felt at various levels: of phenomenology, of the imagination, of æstheticism. The extraordinary winter cold: it changes the landscape into a supernatural world, transforms animals and human beings into mythical creatures, and itself into 'a sort of savage force'. Throwing humans back into a primitive age, it assumes the shape 'of a wolf, a rabid, mad dog'." [3]
Katerine Gosselin, Acta-Fabula
"Harouna: What shall we do?
Kevin: Desert the dog? You're heartless.
Yoann: Well, baby, don't wet your pants - relax.
Ahmed is too weak to get up. Yoann hits him over the head with his helmet. Ahmed faints. Yoann hits him a second time, a third.
Yoann: And don't you ever touch my brother, OK? You'll never get your shit on him, you'll fever fuck his ass!" [1]
"A deserted soccer field near the ring road by night. At a distance, the outline of the "Iris" housing estate. Snow everywhere. Three silhouettes stand out from the white, bowing down to something at their feet, something moving just one more time. They are looking at Ahmed, whom they have beaten to death with a motorbike helmet. They finally bury him in the mass of snow. Time to get back into the warmth of their home. In the apartment, where a tranquil mother and a suspicious brother have been waiting for them, they can wash and sit down to dinner. I've always been intrigued by this sort of thing - venomous families. I always like to describe what sensuality does to a family - for I believe the family is the very place where sensuality thrives - and likewise to try to throw into relief the poisoned atmosphere that prevails in it."
Christophe Honoré
"Jeremy : You are part of me and you have died from my brothers' blows... Is this what happened? They beat you to death? Yep, that's it. I know it is. They beat you to death and then forgot you. They might pass next to your body and wouldn't notice you, nor realise what they've done. And they might as well kill me too, because to them I'm just the same as you. I'm the effeminate gay, the chicken, the bottom man. Tell me, am I right? They didn't hit you because you were an Arab. They couldn't care less that you were an Arab. If you were an Arab you'd exist in their eyes. They killed you because we're nothing but objects they forget the minute they stop seeing us. Things they forget as soon as one stops talking about them. It doesn't make any difference to them to kill us. (...) I'm cold. I'm freezing.." [1]
"In this story of Ahmed's death, it is basically Jeremy against whom his own family turns, a highly pernicious family, cannibalistic even. To what extent is one prepared to betray one's own family just to appear to be honest or, inversely, at what point does one decide to protect one's next of kin? In the local news you can frequently read about how far people may go to defend their family. It's like living with a skeleton in the cupboard. I love the idea that one who is not ready to live with a skeleton in the cupboard has estranged himself, culturally, from his family, has become something like a pariah in the midst of his family because he has adopted a form of culture, reached a level of education, not accessible to the rest of his family."
CHRISTOPHE HONORÉ
"The play focuses on the transposition of tragedy into our era, interestingly enough with references to Ancient Greece with its terrifying crimes and rife homosexuality. It is not intended to be a parody, on the contrary, it tries to revive the style of that era while at the same time reconciling it with contemporary theatrical conventions and giving it 'a new form'. In line with the motifs of Racine's tragedies, we are faced with a hero confronting a hostile world, who remains isolated and hovers between brotherly feelings that keep him from delivering the criminals to the police and the wish to do justice to his dead friend."
Anastasia Patts
© Photography : Alain Fonteray, Jean-Louis Fernandez
Texts assembled by Jutta Johanna Weiss
Translation from the French by Herbert Kaiser
© CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient
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