I did not want to go to Japan alone because this adventure must also feed the one we live in France. So I asked four of my accomplices to come with me. A scenographer, Emmanuel Clolus, a light designer, Daniel Lévy and two actors, Claire Aveline and Jean-Charles Dumay, because I want the music of French language to be present on stage.
They will also be of great help for the communication and transmission with the Japanese actors. In the "corps à corps" of the stage, information will circulate better and faster!

Lagarce's play is interspersed with musical interludes, during those interludes or at other times, Claire and Jean-Charles will play pages torn from the repertory (Garnier, Racine, Marivaux, Claudel...). They will be, as in Nô or Kabuki stage servants, "invisible" to the spectators, ghosts.

Nous, les héros starts with actors leaving the stage for the wings at the end of a show. I want Japanese spectators to take their seats while a play is ending. We chose the end of a play by Molière, probably the last three scenes of L'avare. An ending "à la Molière"; completely incredible and unlikely where filiations solve everything. I would like the play to start like that and the public to hear the first words of Nous, les héros while the actors take off their stage clothes . Oriza wanted to work on Molière's text with his actors before our arrival, so that this part of the play would be like a gift to welcome us. I will not change anything, we will start from that.

We will bring French period costumes. It will be a way to pay a tribute to the magnificent Nô Theatre in Toga, in which the show will be played and that usually lends its stage to somptuous traditionnal Japanese costumes.

In November, I went back to Tokyo to cast actors and to start working with them. At that time I began to realize that we had offered ourselves an adventure that went far beyond the simple fact of coming and directing a play. An adventure that, for almost a year, will lead us to live theatre through discovery and experimentation, in two languages, in two countries and with two different casts.

Frédéric Fisbach

1998