Théâtre National de Bretagne
Direction Arthur Nauzyciel
Text by Joëlle Gayot / Translation by Jonas Parson
« Gazing into the mirror in the evening, sitting upright like the upper half of a boa frozen amidst its jungle…»
Had you entered the Pont des Arts Auditorium at 20:30 on the 13th November, a woman’s voice would have woven through the ellipsis following the word ‘jungle’. The voice belongs to actress Lena Paugam. She adeptly matches the movements of her body to the cadence of her proclamations. She speaks with grace. Her body follows the rhythm of the words as they spring forth. Her voice rises and falls as it explores Milène Tournier’s writing, slowing, accelerating, chanting, slamming, intensifying this contemporary speech delving into the margins, seeking the shunned and the invisible, the women we don’t see when we pass them by in the streets, the women for whom we wouldn’t hold the door if we met them at the foot of our buildings.
The disappearance of tears (the play’s title) is not a philosophical treatise but a scathing humanist manifesto. The text (a monologue) would have summoned a heroine refusing to allow time bury her sorrow, her first love and the flurry of words carrying within them even more intimate and secret suffering, held silent for much too long. This is a who woman cannot and will no longer cry. Her tears dried up fifteen years earlier when the man she loved vanished from her life. What do we become when we lose the ability to cry? Do we shrivel up from the inside, or do we rather become a unending invisible lake, spreading through our veins, our guts, our muscles, contained only by the resistance of our skin, as it prevents the onslaught, stopping the flood, conjuring the shipwreck?
On a stage as dark and gleaming as a large puddle, the actress would have made her way through a maze of threads. Jewelled tassels bursting into as many raindrops, salty sea-spray, delicate drops beading in the corner of the eye. This woman once was, as Lena Paugam tells us, “a young woman who would write the words she found pretty on her skin”. She has become, shares Lena Paugam, “a solitary woman who collects the videos watched by none on the internet”. A woman who does her best to keep hold of memories, of the small things of life, of fleeting feelings and long-gone emotions.
You would have heard, occupying this liquid stage, Barbara Strozzi’s sublime music. “Lagrime mie” – “My tears”, a lament stretched out to the extreme by Lucas Lelièvre. Stretched out into obsessive, hypnotic, concrete waves of raw sound. You would most certainly have closed your eyes. You would have surrendered yourself entirely to this sensory experience. And you would have learned what it means for solitude to reach out to other solitudes.