Brûlé par la glace by Peter Asmussen - Direction Laurent Terzieff

Peter Asmussen Brûlé par la glace
direction Laurent Terzieff

Presentation : The director / Georges Lerwer

Aspiring for a superior beauty

Having not yet met Peter Asmussen, I can only try to imagine him. Perhaps he presents an image of a perfectly well-balanced man, perhaps even that of a jovial fellow.
But I cannot help sensing in him a continual turmoil that he must endeavour to master, to control. The unpredictable must haunt him so much, that he "organises" his anxieties, hence the geometric, symmetrical construction of the play, where the figure 3, the religious figure, returns in an haunting and magic way "3 women, 3 men, 3 paintings put together as a triptych". As in music, dissonances are resolved into ordered harmonies. The dialogue which at the beginning lingers, floats, hesitates, is redrafted, repeated, developed in a musical way. The music of the words ritualises the unspeakableness of beings. The playwright seems to be wary of his own chaos, he does not participate in the drama he retells. He simply translates it, makes it happen. He leaves no room for his own impulses: they are only the invisible key which allows him to let us glimpse the secret of his characters, with the third eye of the visionary, the time to open and to close a door.
For Asmussen, to write is not a private therapy, but a surgical operation, which consists of slipping into the veins of our unconscious, the aspiration for a superior beauty, endlessly scorned, an excitation of the soul, which makes us perceive things in life like the vague reflection of a correspondence with heaven and which make us aware of our nature of exiles, as foreseen by Baudelaire.

... / ...
In "Brûlés par la glace", the conflict lies not in the battle for power or interest, nor in the hold of one over the other, the struggle takes place between souls and minds. All the rest is only triviality, like the chicken, a repugnant and, at the same time, fascinating fuel, but in any case indispensable for "feeding the machine". Threats and blackmail are not taken seriously. But the emotional tone of the play is not derision - for once it is avoided, which is rare in contemporary theatre - what resounds here is cruelty and abandonment.
Here, suffering is inflicted by separation. Moreover, space is a prison: each is banished to a an enclosed place which resembles a cell or a niche. Clothes too are straitjackets, jails which imprison the body all the better to separate. Asmussen's universe is not edifying. Of course there are not the good on one side and the bad on the other. Rather, there are a certain kind of guilty and a certain kind of innocent. The guilty have accepted the misfortune of being born, they have loved, they have consummated their love and have therefore given birth to innocents.
The innocent too want to love, but are refused love by the guilty. They are dependent on them: from them, they receive only chores or orders. They have no rights. They are told, "You must not love". One would like them to be characters without willpower.
Asmussen's innocent prefer to die. They cannot bear to have "frozen souls" like their elders, who have so much difficulty accepting themselves, when they emerge from their sleep.
Of this icy space, Asmussen "knows a thing or two", even if he doesn't know everything. One senses that he has travelled, felt, questioned, as if anaesthetised by the cold, but always with a wild need for love.
This is the space of love that has been disowned, scorned, denied, the space of love assassinated, but which, even utterly destroyed, will never be greeted by Asmussen with derision.

Laurent TERZIEFF

Asmussen makes us think that...

Peter Asmussen is a direct descendant of the great Scandinavian playwrights(Ibsen--Strindberg).
"Brûlés par la glace" is a comedy filled with the fires of passion.
He places at the heart of the action a conflict between the generations still charged by the separation which isolates beings and distances them.
Asmussen makes us think that our nature makes us into exiles, that is, solitary. Here, it is a question of showing how love can be rejected. Who is guilty? Who is innocent? The author lets us imagine that types of innocent and types of guilty exist.
This is a theatre of cruelty and also a theatre of tenderness. We have been born, we have loved, we have given birth to the innocent, we have begotten the guilty.
Laurent Terzieff creates once again an astoundingly true characterisation. He is "the tree" which cannot be uprooted. He is the powerful breath of truth. His role in Asmussen's play is without a doubt one of the most inspiring he has ever presented to his public, always ready to hear such a great man of the theatre.

Georges LERWER
Journalist