Alcandre, the magician director of
L'illusion comique (
The Comic Illusion), presents his theater much like Plato's paradoxical cave - a space of unveiling, of blinding, dazzling experience and awareness and knowledge of being. Without the world of theater, our real world would be an orphan, because today, more than ever, the virtual world has swept over and inundated the world we live in. And through the voice of Alcandre, Corneille reminds us that theater is a joyful way of thinking the world, more visceral and incarnate than philosophy, more anxious than religion : one of Man's greatest spiritual adventures.
Giorgio Strehler's
Illusion Comique, remains my first theatrical memory. It was here at the Odeon theater and during this performance, that for the first time, my vocation, wild, uneducated and unformed, was confronted with total Art, Art that was capable of turning in upon itself in order to attain a sense of totality. Ever since that night, the Odeon has been the absolute temple of theater for me. And
The Illusion, a unique case of meditation on the philosophical sense of representation, has always been associated in my mind with the sacred form of the Odeon theater itself, an austere construction, built like a temple, with its stucco caryatids, the two statues of Tragedy and Comedy, the bust of Antoine, its staircase and its terse, stone foyer, and finally, its Italian style theater, a cavern of gold and purple.
If I have so felt the need to mention this vivid memory, it is because I wish to say that one's destiny, if it is given a slight nudge, always knows how to come full circle : we are opening next season with the
Illusions comiques / The Comic Illusions, a play whose title, you have now understood, was pilfered from my past ! The fact that
Illusion has become plural, means that we are now in a more political sphere ; and with "comic illusions" now plural, we intend on laughing at these illusions, and disillusions. To laugh is to think with ones' body, it is to know that one is mortal. And in so doing, it seems to me that theater, if it can still teach each of us to become a citizen, teaches us above all else, how to become mortal.
What we need today, is a much vaster, wider definition of theater. Today, we need not one hundred, but a thousand different definitions, a cataract of definitions that we can burn like propitiatory incense on the alter of Theater. Because it is urgent that we understand, for each of us to understand, that we all form a single community, a "People" - especially if we no longer have the strength, pilfered by the media, to create a community. But has theater ever served this function ? Theater tends to have a more humble function and a more immodest one too : theater attempts to change the man, the woman, and not the world. Elitist ? No, in what sense is a theatergoing audience elitist ? Especially today, when everyone shares the same TV culture, the same media acculturation. A minority ? It cannot be otherwise because theater must remain an individual experience. And even if all of the theaters were full, the community would only exist for a brief moment, during that short space of time, creating a necessary gathering of those who live in the froth and the foam off our globalized media world, a world of instant communication.
And our new task cannot be carried out without the poets. Poets are the ones who love the "real", who teach us to love it too. But there is no poem without a real space for poetry, without this space where we await and dream of the poem. Thanks to Georges Lavaudant, and his talents as artist and director, The Odeon is today, after a splendid decade, unique in the world. The Berthier theater has also proved to be a space of discovery and subversion, and not only an historical monument. And I wish to extend my gratitude to Georges Lavaudant, for having taken the name "European Theater" to mean more than just a simple declaration of faith, and for having opened the doors to his theatre to splendor, to insolence. But now, we must continue our work, and conquer new territories, open our doors to new audiences, and I do not use the word "us" lightly. For without "us", theater is nothing. The philosophers tell us that "us" is an unpronounceable word. Unless it is pronounced in the silence of wonder, in the laughter of salvation, in the mute consciousness of that which unites us.
Olivier Py
March, 2007.
