Did you know Jean-Luc Lagarce before performing in J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne?
I knew Jean-Luc Lagarce's writing through my interest in the publishers, Editions "Les Solitaires intempestifs", of which he was, I think, one of the creators, if not the creator. But as actress, my first encounter was J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne, and I was captivated, completely under the spell of this writing that is so civilized, full of restraint and refinement, decency and intelligence, where every word, repeated and re-repeated, is seeking the truest, the purest emotion.

When you approach a play, do you always try to link it to its author?
I cannot begin my work as actress if I haven't put together a seedbed to draw from. By filling myself up with an author's entire work, plus his interviews, and also the texts he has written outside the theatre, I try to enter his world. Above all, I try to link myself to him through his work. His private life doesn't concern me, even though it is very present in the case of Jean-Luc Lagarce.
My work then consists of placing myself at the author's service by creating his characters in complete freedom and responsibility, along with the director of course. Not one of the protagonists of the theatrical adventure alone possesses the truth. He feels its way along, the author too. After resolving a deadlock, we go on to another, and through the evolution of all these interrogations, the finished play gains the mystery that is indispensable to every artistic creation, whatever the practice may be.

J'étais dans ma maison et j'attendais que la pluie vienne retells the story of a wait shared by five women. In working up the play, how are the different relationships between the women depicted through this one story of waiting?
Five women are waiting for a man. A grandmother, the mother, the three sisters, each one plays her role. The feeling of waiting is therefore different for each of them. What is played out between them is the desire to possess the best memories of the person they're waiting for. Since their memories have been interpreted and transgressed, and are therefore erroneous, it is of themselves that they speak, of their emotional cracks, of the joyful and terrifying balance sheet of their respective lives. Waiting for another is perhaps wanting to get free of oneself, when the weight is too heavy to bear, when the wound bleeds too much. Also, in Jean-Luc Lagarce's play, the wait is multiple. Who are we waiting for? The grandson, the son, the violent brother, the charming brother? What are we waiting for? The end of illness, the return, the reawakening, death … Every human being is waiting … for someone or something. This tomorrow which brings us life and which leads to death?

What is the mother's position in relation to this wait? What will become of her, afterwards?
If he doesn't return or if he dies, she is finished. The two people who may still be able to change are the second and the youngest daughters. The eldest, on the other hand, will not change: she is already in a position from where change is impossible. When she tells her story, she already recounts her own end. As if this man she's waiting for is already lost and as if he was the only man in her life. The relationship of the girls to their "young brother" is more incestuous than anything else: for them, their brother is the man they are waiting for.
To understand the work of Jean-Luc Lagarce, it must also be known that he left his family and that he never returned. His life was very different from that of his "family clan", who probably waited for him too.
In Juste la fin du monde, he returns to the place of his childhood and tells us how his family made him feel guilty, but his own feeling of guilt is also present, as if things had to be put in order and the balance sheet drawn up before leaving (Jean-Luc Lagarce had a deadline: his own death was approaching rapidly).

In the play, the writing takes the idea of brooding over things in a very particular way.
His style is quite remarkable: he refines his writing through constant repetition. Not only of words, but with repetition that seeks the right emotion … which he will never find, because emotion cannot be refined: there are no words for saying an emotion precisely. There is no real word for hatred, no real word for love.
The end of the play Juste la fin du monde sums up, to my mind, what J'étais dans ma maison… is saying. After leaving his family, he walks along a disused railway line, to a viaduct overhanging a huge valley. There, he wants to give a long and loud scream, but he doesn't do it. At the end of his walk, all that remains is the sound of his footsteps on the gravel … This is what I find so magnificent in Lagarce: this scream which he never gives, which stays inside him and with which he fills his characters. The work of Jean-Luc Lagarce is developed from this research: instead of screaming, he seeks words to probe this scream and all that remains in the end is the sound of his footsteps, deep down inside. He was not able to scream anything but this scratching.
In every rehearsal, one more little element appears. We rehearse and re-rehearse to find the exact words, to give the exact emotion. Lagarce reproduces this whirlwind of words in all his plays, no matter what the subject.

In the middle of all this compulsive talking, the Mother seems more vigilant than her daughters, when she corrects them and moderates their statements.
She modifies the memory of the father's violence towards the son. She says, "It's not true", but that's all she says. This is also the richness of Lagarce: he releases a repetitive thought which seeks the truth. This questioning is essential in Lagarce. If there is only one truth, it is unknown, and therefore it is multiple, it belongs to each person. Everyone has a right to his piece of the truth, that he interprets according to what he is and what he lives.
In J'étais dans ma maison…, each of them claims a piece of the corpse, as if it belongs to her by rights. Because for me, it's a corpse. Like during a wake, waiting for something but not knowing what. We reinvent a life for the dead person. Are we waiting for something which already no longer exists? The play doesn't say.

In the text, some words, bits of phrases, are in italics. How did you work on these passages?
Each actress takes them and imagines them in her own way. For me, they are words spoken by the son, recalled and repeated: "He used to say that …". It was in this sense that I worked them, and not as if they were the incursion of a different style. For these lines occur in another place and time.
Time is an essential element in the work of Jean-Luc Lagarce. With him, the future is almost completely excluded: he depicts a present which has enormous difficulty reaching towards a future. The future almost never leads to anything, since he himself, as a writer, no longer has one. His illness is fundamental - a serious illness, from which he will not recover. Everything he writes is based on a story that inevitably passes through the past. It is only through memory that the word can still act, that one can still live.
I think that J'étais dans ma maison… is involved in this particular conception of time. In this play, there is no future. Except perhaps for the youngest, although in the end, all these women will stay here, all five of them. We don't know for sure, this must be left open too.
In his play Nous, les héros, in which I also worked with Philippe Sireuil, it's a little the same thing. The subject is borrowed from Kafka, it's the story of a Yiddish troupe in Germany, in the middle of the war. Again, it deals with this struggle of the present, which is a terrible struggle, as it has no future. The future is dead. As if the author's struggle with his illness had no future. This is, by and large, my view of Lagarce.

This play was created at the Théâtre de l'Ancre, which has a very small auditorium, like that of the théâtre Blocry, where you will perform in Louvain-la-Neuve. This is therefore an intimist play. How is this reflected in the setting?
The setting corresponds to this same idea, it also calls the question. It could be a kitchen or a dining room - there is a table, some chairs, a door, a staircase going up, a corridor, but it is not a naturalistic place. There is no back wall, the set is held up by nothing, it's as if suspended. It's a place where people wait, with some important elements, the staircase, a storey that we don't see, and probably a door which could lead outside, but which we don't see either.
I don't think the play is intimist, it's the perpetual brooding over things in search of the right emotion. Or of the lie, too. Searching for the right emotion also goes through lying: to what extent do we lie to ourselves to reach our truth. In J'étais dans ma maison…, there is a lot of lying, but lying that is not conscious, not moral. Here, it comes from the way in which emotions and situations are idealised. We would have liked it to be like that. Was it like that? Not sure… This is the richness of this play

© 2001 "Théâtre-contemporain.net".
Tous droits réservés.