Théâtre National de Bretagne
Direction Arthur Nauzyciel
Text by Joëlle Gayot /Translation by Jonas Parson
If you’d been invited to Florence & Moustafa’s wedding, as planned on 21st November at 17:00 at the TNB, you would have seen what high-schoolers still got to see. Unlike you, they were still invited to attend, as the show was maintained for students even though traditional audiences weren’t allowed to see it.
The master of ceremony is called Guillaume Vincent. He is responsible for wedding these two young adults who know nothing of each other but will learn each other’s secrets over the span of this short show.
Florence and Moustafa weren’t born ex nihilo from the mind of their maker. They both come directly from a mythical text which has obsessed the artist for many years: The Arabian Nights. The bride and groom-to-be exchange fairy-tales, revealing unsaid secrets about themselves, their pasts, their fantasies and their bodies. After the first toast (to which you would have drunk, had you been there), the dice are cast and the liberated voices speak in the present.
“Fairytales aren’t monologues » asserts Guillaume Vincent, for whom the essential partner of this unbridled adventure is the audience, to whom the actor addresses his text, varying the intensity of his acting according to how calm (or not) the assembled group is. If the room is joyful, the wedding will be all the merrier. If the audience is glum, the marriage will be less festive. Such is the porous nature of theatre, of the connexion between the actors and their witnesses, who, even simply seated in the room, colour the atmosphere of the play with their moods. This explains Guillaume Vincent’s eagerness to play for high-schoolers: “will they accept this gift?”
Sadly, you won’t be there to see if the challenge was successful. You won’t witness this high-wire act teetering on the fine line of theatre and freestyling with improvisations. Drawing from the magic of the Arabian Nights, the show unfolds in 45 minutes tops the essential mettle of this universal text: its poetry, its epicness, its ribaldry, its humour, its capacity to free itself from spatiotemporal limits. Its fanciful folly. And of course, its core: love. Which frees its characters from their shackles, as a slightly amused Guillaume Vincent points out: “With the lockdown, we realised that most of the heroes and heroines in the Arabian Nights were locked up.”
The only thing left is to hope that your children will tell you about the show. If they do, it will be through them, through their words and emotions that your imagination will be “deconfined” and that theatre will come to you as you cannot go to it.