It is one of those things in our lives that we just don’t see happen
Joël Pommerat
A woman has disappeared. Another woman tells us about the disappearance and attempts to understand what happened. Ten years have passed. But events like these cannot be forgotten. Little by little the story emerges, as in a news report, where the testimonies of several people are heard and juxtaposed. Testimonies from Estelle’s colleagues who spent time with her during the few decisive months that transformed their lives. We plunge into the day-to-day existence of a store, with behind-the-scenes pettiness, rivalries at the workplace, moments of complete weariness and dizziness (but also pure comedy because Pommerat, in this particular work, wanted laughter to be a large part of the play.) Estelle, who always knows how to «rise above things », has a multi-purpose occupation, which pretty much means that anyone can ask her to do anything at any time. And her work colleagues take as much advantage of her as does Blocq, the owner and boss, a man whose vulgarity and brutal cynicism have reaped him the hatred of all his employees. Except Estelle… !
Just like its circular setting, My Cold Room is a play with multiple entrances. Each scene corresponds to a clear-cut situation, whose stakes are carefully stated : as one might say : « we understand the story perfectly well. » But the compression of shots, the multiplication of stakes, the variation of points of view, give the drama a wealth of complexity. In the end, who is Estelle, and what has she lived through ?…it is as if narrative, as practiced by Pommerat, having slid, work after work, towards contemporary tales, no longer had to contest the rules already inherent in traditional fables, and is able to build its own, with total freedom, and with tacit agreement from the audience. The manner in which this is staged is largely responsible for the result ; it digs into, contests or intertwines the simplest of stories : it is the theatrical counterpoint of these stories that builds, before our very eyes, undefined backgrounds, that escape us, are kept secret, and this is so typical of Pommerat’s atmospheres. Once again we discover his concern for the poetic molding of all dimensions of Time, and at the same instant – the distant past, futures that sketch themselves out into the distance, then fork off, brief scenes caught in real present life, collections of moments with a realistic color to them ; the grey drizzle of daily life crisscrossed here and there, like resurgences of some deep gulf-stream, by echoes that have escaped from our nocturnal conscience, or signs that have fallen from the starry sky, carted along in the backwash of a lapse of time that can be meausred in months or in years. Pommerat inscribes it all within the framework of the « grand narrative », that he has left aside for the last six or seven years – but without sacrificing anything of the virtuoso clarity that he has built in the meantime, nor of the capricious diversity of his narrative segments, emphasizing and underlining the major articulations of a story where each of us, will recognize a bit of ourselves.
