God help me : I am two !!
Heinrich von Kleist
It had to be brought back. This theatrical challenge, superbly directed by André Engel and performed by the stage actors who have been following him since Léonce and Léna, The Last Judgment and King Lear, was highly lauded during the 2008 Molière theater awards. The five acts that make up the play represent a wide variety of genres : a serialized, action-packed love story, Little Catherine is also a medieval chronicle, a fantastic tale, a crime novel, a cape and dagger story, a timeless myth, a mystical poem, a folk ballad...a beautiful voyage into a strange, marvelous and magical world for the Christmas holidays ! The plot is quite mad ! Catherine, a young, motherless child, barely 16, born into a very modest background, leaves everything behind one day, without a complaint or even a word of explanation, in order to follow the Count Wetter Von Strahl. Nothing in the young girl's life could have led one to believe that she would be a crazed virgin or a soldier's girl...stunned and afraid, her father finally attributes her strange attitude to supernatural causes : according to him, Strahl must have bewitched the poor, unfortunate girl. He sues the man in the powerful Sainte Vehme court, in order to force him to confess to his actions.
The play opens on the first hearing of the trial, between old Theobald and the Count, who pleads not guilty and swears that he had never seen Catherine before meeting her by chance and in the presence of her father. Which is of course the truth. Why then, does nothing or no one seem able to stop the young woman from following Strahl, going so far as to break both of her legs when she jumps out a window ? Against all expectations, she is questioned by the Count himself, but all this does is increase the mystery...We are reminded of Pascal, writing in his Pensées « I only believe in stories where the witnesses have their throats slit . » But what has Catherine actually witnessed ? Does she even know herself ? Could it be possible that little Catherine saw the Count's face during a period in time that is not of this world ? Théobald, who saw Catherine look at the Count the very first time and immediately drop to the ground « at his feet, as though she had been struck by lightning », may be right in thinking that there has been supernatural tinkering - but is it necessarily of a demonic nature ? The daughter of a simple armorer could not possibly hope to marry a noble knight - but what if that was precisely her destiny, what if it was necessary for the « impossible » to become real ? So that the man and the woman, these two pieces of a dream-like puzzle, can finally join each other, an entire « world » will have to be traveled. And it will be - as though nothing less would do, in order to reinvent Adam and Eve.
