A certain emptiness/certainly an emptiness
It was not until after his premature death that Jean-Luc Lagarce became known as a poetic dramatist. This was also the case for Didier-Georges Gabily. Bernard-Marie Koltès had at least a well-earned reputation before meeting the same expeditious fate. The disappearance of these three, in only a few years, all aged about forty, the time of maturity and a universal destiny, has created a gap (almost unnoticed) in the dramaturgical history of our country, our language. Those who come after them no longer have a shield, a living example or counterexample, to shelter behind when putting forward their own efforts. They are immediately on the front line. We should wish them long life…

The name of Jean-Luc Lagarce first became known to the public through his later texts, his dramatic or purely narrative accounts of his experience of his fatal disease and the relationship with the world that it aroused in him and around him. Thus, in spite of Lagarce’s elegant sense of propriety, it was for reasons of burning topicality that interest was taken in him (and thanks to his fine directing).

As for us, we were fascinated by what I would call the “mature texts”, from the middle of the 1980’s, plays which, curiously, Lagarce did not stage himself: these Prétendants that we have taken up today, and Derniers remords avant l’oubli, which we would like to produce in the near future. We are probably appealed to, like Lagarce, and have been for a long time, by a sort of socio-political History-Geography of our modern Gaul. These two plays could fit in with this. But Lagarce’s work, no more than ours, cannot be reduced to this.

A strange undertaking
It was in about 1983-4 that Lagarce embarked upon this adventure. He wanted to write a play which looked contemporary France in the face. It was a risky business.
Many had given up in advance, some had broken their teeth on it. His personal diary bears the marks of many long difficulties, temporary abandons, different trials and tribulations. Thus several years were required to reach the end of this project. But what a striking result!

Lagarce had provincial France (Besançon, not to mention any names) and the world of culture before his eyes every day. So he took these two facts as his starting point. As always with him, the anecdote is quite simple, but it’s only an anecdote. One day in autumn, we attend a sort of handing-over-of-power ceremony in a cultural institution. Not a Board Meeting, oh no, since the fact is that political negotiations between the State and the City Council have led to its abolition (sleight of hand). Here, there is the Ministry official, the tired inspector, there, the (female) Deputy Mayor in charge of Culture stuffed full of electoral energy, the old and the new directors of the institution of course, the administrative staff, the old, outmoded members of the famous Board of Governors… A day for fools, manoeuvres, anxieties and crises, around an issue vital for everyone but laughable in the eyes of the history of the world.

Admittedly, the fact that this is a cultural vivarium with its manias and its failings, and its well-known cast of commedia dell’arte characters, may make the cultural professionals smile. But, at bottom, the situation is that of any small company when a new (young) director arrives, in addition flanked by an assistant whose duties (and thus whose place he will take) are unknown.

Surprisingly, almost everyone is accompanied by their spouse. We discover, little by little, that this is all a family concern. But especially, this allows Lagarce to weave in the little private misfortunes that come and mingle with public snubs. Thus he brilliantly avoids a simple sociological statement, a simple description of a collective established fact.

The tragicomedy of the language
Seventeen characters are on stage during the entire play, or almost: a society in miniature, where each one plays out his short-term destiny. Like all theatre characters, and many social characters, they speak in order to live, to survive.
But in Lagarce’s plays, the language, or rather the words, occupy a quite specific place: like an entity floating up from people, around them, between them. And the word is the place where many catastrophes occur: followed by errors that are difficult to make good, procedures which produce an unexpected even opposite effect, denials, antiphrases, wasted words and gestures, Freudian slips, a whole festival of non-relationships in these relationships. This is how we live, often, and this is what Lagarce is often trying to tell us.

Thus, will our little community continue to oscillate between the pitiful, the touching, the tragic even, and the comical, the ridiculous, indeed the burlesque? We never quite know if we should laugh or cry. In this sense, I find the play quite “Chekhovian”: a sort of “Cherry Orchard” (here, we see a House change hands, surrounded by all the little misfortunes that this gives rise to), but a “Cherry Orchard” crossed by a “Revizor”. Lagarce, as we know, was not lacking in culture…

Staging “Les Prétendants”
Is to listen to every word. Not a single word, not even the apparently most innocuous, should be played down. The score contains only the necessary notes. It is indeed a musical score: a double choir for 17 voices. For the actors: one line every seventeen lines, on average. This implies a quite particular mode of theatrical existence. This also implies a unique way of organising rehearsals, of concentrating, of constructing the play.

No asides. Mutterings are public. Everything must be heard.
The actors must be given a free hand and, at the same time, work together to reach an extraordinary accuracy of intentions. No “putting on a show”: humility, emotion, stammering organised on the human level. Modesty of acting, even if they have to delve deeply into their brain and sensitivity to manage it. Moments of indescribable disorder where everything should appear clearer than in something skilfully organised.
To be as accurate and true as AMATEUR actors, by using other means.

“Random” passages like in contemporary music, coming together at the pause.

Stage design
A display for the actor-characters, pure, almost abstract, like an exhibition hall where characters from the paintings, or the photos, stroll around in confined liberty. A simple machine for coming in and going out.
What had to be avoided was a realistic description, even a transposed one, of a “cultural” architecture, with its required circulation. Lagarce’s story is not limited to a truthful description: the truth is in the hearts, the words, in the air which floats between the characters.

The actors
Seventeen actors of all ages and of all kinds had to be brought together. A fascinating collection. I sought to compose this tableau vivant by bringing together several of my families: The “old” ones: Michèle Foucher, Alain Rimoux and Rémy Carpentier, from the time of the TNS and even earlier.
The “recent” ones: Valérie Blanchon, Flore Lefebvre des Noëttes, Éric Frey, Pierre Gondard, Philippe Crubézy, Olivier Angèle, met faithfully during the last years of Nanterre (from Karl Marx Théâtre Inédit up to Lorenzaccio, and including Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, Homme pour homme and Tartuffe).
The “little” ones: Nadège Taravellier, Alexandre Le Nours and Xuan Dao, fresh from ERAC and from Pancomedia by Botho Strauss.
The “new” ones: some of them old friends, but with whom I had never never sailed. And the occasion presented itself: Anne Benoit and Guillaume Lévêque (of the Françon family), Lucien Marchal (who once welcomed Les Prétendants, staged by François Rancillac with amateurs, in his “Théâtre en Actes”), Jean-Charles Dumay (of the Fisbach family), and, last but not least, Charlotte Maury-Sentier.
A magnificent human kaleidoscope on the edge of rehearsals. United by the secret links of a whole history of theatrical work, united in the love of the play. Discovering and re-discovering themselves through the magic filter of the late Jean-Luc Lagarce, who will perhaps live again with us.

Jean-Pierre Vincent

23 novembre 2002