“I wish…I wish…”
Charles Perrault
Often improvised using a simple structure, clearly aimed at its audience, which it calls upon to witness and participate in the action, the tale is in and by itself a good example of fictional autonomy. For the children in the audience it stimulates the give and take between the imagination and critical thought; for adults it reawakens memory and the spell the work once cast. As François Flahault has written, great tales are initiatory: “How can we not become hostage to the links from which we are formed? How can we detach ourselves from them to form new ones? How can we become ourselves?” Rituals, therefore, but rituals which are an opening to freedom, tales are made to be constantly reinvented by those who tell them, and whether they’re about Little Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio or Cinderella, their heroes would never allow themselves to be imprisoned once and for all in a text; their adventures will never cease being transformed, from one book or evening to the next. This trait may explain Joël Pommerat’s interest in tales, for it is one which harmonizes remarkably well with the conception he has of the work involved in writing. And, in fact, Pommerat has often said this himself: he doesn’t write texts, he writes shows; his books which afterwards are based on these shows are mere reflections of them. For Pommerat, to approach a destiny like Cinderella’s, one must above all not start out with answers or certainties (“Cinderella is the story about…”), but with questions, with intuitions, even if they seem brutal (“I want to write a play for children about grief and death.”); then let all sorts of materials, at first seemingly ill-assorted, attach themselves to these questions, these intuitions; materials which little by little will interact, dissolve, thrust themselves forward until they reach a point where they find their own consistency, their own balance – a very far cry, perhaps, from what the bases of research might lead one to expect. One must be receptive to material things: a glass, ashes, the brightness or gloom that radiates from certain atmospheres. One must take note of bursts of sound, sketch out contrasts and paths – at this point in time Pommerat envisions progress towards more and more transparency, but this is merely a signpost for his work. The more or less thorny thickets that make up stories must be allowed to grow without being overly trimmed; one must have the liberty to people a jumble of obscure places (which may well remain obscure) with uncertain, transient figures, gaining form and substance through contact with situations which if too carefully spelled out would risk stripping them of their magic. Above all, therefore, and there are profound reasons for this, one must not want to anticipate precisely what the future Cinderella’s face will look like. Pommerat himself doesn’t know what it will look like, nor does he want to, because knowing this ahead of time would amount to the face being lost. And so we must be patient: it’s what’s called a creation.
