W. is in love with a forbidden woman.
He resembles Werther. He thinks he's Werther.
He speaks like him.
He can do nothing except be in love.
He writes love letters.

Hélène is a researcher. She has lost an eye.
She researches the myth of love in literature while waiting for the man of her life.
When she sees W., she recognises Werther and falls in love with him.

W.'s friend is a moviegoer. In life, he is like a person watching a film. Spectator and powerless commentator.

The parents of W. are worried. Love invades their life and frightens them.
Forgotten memories surface again.

Hélène declares her love to W. but W. does not see her.

His parents fear for the life of their son.

about W.

This is a play broken into fragments. Monologues, dialogues, words that criss-cross and follow each other, or are superimposed, and pile up. Words twisting and turning around events.

Pieces of time cut up in the chronology of an uncertain story mixed with thought.
Different degrees of reality among which the characters lose themselves.

Characters who are particularly pathetic in their efforts to exist, in their attempts to speak.

Words to speak love, fear, desire, suffering. To escape from nothingness.

There are areas of shadow. Not everything is said, not everything is visible.

And there are also times when nothing happens. Time which passes, time which shuffles along, fragments which question others.

Apparently, the story has been invented by one of the characters, Hélène, as if she was trying to understand and perhaps act on her own story, the one which appears behind the other, transparent one.

A way of getting out of the torpor of being in love in order to regain possession of oneself, to escape from the ordinary march of time to start looking for the time that has been lost.

This is a comedy about love.
A comedy about the gravity of sentiments. The gravity of the fall of he - or she - who falls - or doesn't fall - in love.

© 2001 "Théâtre-contemporain.net".
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