Suzanne Joubert Jamais de la vie, Olga Direction Alain Fourneau Presentation: The playwright / The director By the playwright : Whispers behind the words In the beginning, there was the sixth script, "La Peau de la Grande Ourse". I'd already directed the other five, each one written for a particular actress. Fictitious portraits, in the third person singular, for which the concern, in the writing as in the directing, was to listen for a particular rhythm, a uniqueness, and each time to bring out a particular, an intimate theatre environment. For "Jamais de la vie, Olga", what was at stake from the beginning, even before the writing, was to work in a foreign language - "in a foreign language" as you might say "in a foreign land" - and through that, to plunge all the more into the music of the voice, the apprehension of space and of a presence. To work by eye and by ear with no apparent concern for meaning, but with the conviction that in the end, it would be all the more present. Then, very quickly came the turbulent desire to move differently, with more openness, other different points of view. So Suzanne Joubert wrote one script for two actresses (one Russian and one French) and I, on my side, asked Youri Pogrebnitchko to direct the French part of the script. Thus was born a heterogeneous project, with multiplication of echoes, and this time, beneath the idea of "portrait" and the notion of "unique" which it covers, an effort to be even more ready to listen to the whispers behind the words which obstinately seek the universal in the particular. Alain Fourneau By the director : In the beginning top Olga, before being written down, was a distant memory. I was in a café. There was a woman, about forty, over-dressed, waiting. You could sense in her manner, the way she was waiting, that there was something crucial happening. She wasn't waiting like people usually wait. A man arrived. And that's when I understood. He was in legionnaire's dress, immaculate. He did not sit opposite her, but to one side, in such a way that they spoke without looking at each other. From their first words, I knew it was their first meeting. And I had the sensation that the time we were in, we who were not part of their story, was becoming confused. As if we were becoming bit players in their story. This time, Georges Drevski, the man in the fiction, is the object (or the subject?) of the wait. So out of step that he brings humour to this story of a wait that could be painful. What on earth could this woman, born of a mother whose precept was that "you have to take off in life" and whose hero was ... Gagarin, have to do with this man, Drevski, who lives in a ground floor flat with a tiny courtyard, and whose interplanetary hero is a canary? I believe that a person like Olga cannot move around without her angel! This figure in the narrative reminds me of a portrait by Bernini with the same expression as the Mona Lisa, that is, it's the observer who, by moving, makes the eyes move. The angel is a little like that, a multiplication of perspectives. Because he sees Olga, but he also sees Drevski, and all the regulars. He's the "central" eye: it's the others who give him movement. Jamais de la vie Olga cannot be summarised as the story of a meeting. For me, it's the story of what cannot be summarised, cannot be reduced: waiting, unfinished time. A time which leaves those who surrender to it, like Olga, on the edge of that other time which flows, which sweeps across, which carries away. Olga is the static shot from a film shown in fast motion. She's the heroine, the main actress. She's the second role. She's the one who is unable to enter the course, the movement of the story. She's there, but the fact of "being there" is not enough. Not one appropriate look, that is, one intended for her, belonging to her, brings her into existence. Apart from Alexandre, the waiter in the café where, for a long time, she's methodically been going to wait for the suitors chosen by the marriage bureau. But Alexandre is an angel. At the most, Alexandre would be able to vouch for her presence, her way of sitting down, of dressing, looking, drinking beer, moving, but he could never be the protagonist she's waiting for to enter into dialogue with life. An angel sees and hears. That's all. To write one and the same script for two actresses, one Russian and one French, was the request. At first, the impossibility of this idea seemed insurmountable. But then, the movement of the writing placed reality in the centre of the script because it also speaks of the double, the split personality and of the strangeness borne within. The stranger, the one that Olga becomes for herself, overtakes the concrete reality of the stage, I believe, she clears from the field the mines of exoticism and, as a result, she leaves to the actresses what is important and natural to be understood of them: their gestures, movements, rhythms, voices. Two variations on one theme. Suzanne Joubert © 2001 "Théâtre-contemporain.net". Tous droits réservés.