Starting from this evening,
be afraid no longer to live more.
Joël Pommerat
This season Joël Pommerat’s creation will consist in the revival of two shows. One of them had its opening at the Bouffes du Nord two seasons ago. The other one marked the arrival of Pommerat in our theater as an associate artist. To say that Ma Chambre Froide was a success is an understatement: in 2011 all available seats were snapped up within forty-eight hours. A revival was a must. Circles/Fictions, which had also enjoyed great success, forms a sort of diptych with the other play: their themes share certain affinities, even though the narrative treatments are quite different. Above all, these two works are the first ones that Pommerat, leaving aside the frontal aspect of Italian theater, wanted to be set in a circular space. But the circles of Circles don’t designate the sole arena where the visions orchestrated by Pommerat loom up before us. They also define, in a more or less restrained fashion, groups of characters that are like living stones thrown into the waters of time. Each of them evolves in the framework of a rather narrow horizon, clearly circumscribed and identified by a date. Pommerat gives a list of them in the first pages of his text. Seven or eight “circles” are enumerated there in the order in which they appear on stage, which does not mean chronologically. Some dates are very close to each other, so much so that they are barely distinguishable; others are separated by a gulf of several centuries.
Unpredictability is absolute. Each time the lights go out it’s impossible to know which circle will appear before us when they go back on. For each time it’s a different plot. The only connections among them are those made by the awareness of each member of the audience. It’s up to us to dream in picking up echos, returns, perhaps even relationships: is a forest where two couples seem to be turning in circles still the one where we see a motionless medieval silhouette? Is the crying that we hear the same as that which resonated, nearly a century before, in the room of a child left all alone? Little by little, in this puzzle of stories in a big Story, in History (or is it more an obscure Forest of Existences than a puzzle?) the shadow of less apparent laws, laws that are almost indiscernible, begins to hinted at, make itself felt. Everywhere lives connect with the essential – and fear, loneliness, the need to be loved, or recognized, the hesitant search for a shelter which would preserve us from the worst, in utmost urgency or in the giddiness of despair, are like intersections among all these fragments of humanity who are mutually unaware of each other: invisible, moving points, all the more sensitive because they have never expressed themselves. And each one of these enchanted circles that Pommerat draws around these several existences makes this visible, and recalls it.
