Mother of Wajdi Mouawad

By fashionlifeshopping 29/06/2022 1270 Views

Photo Tuong-Vigyen

"I haven't cried since my mother's death."This December 18, 1987, Wajdi Mouawad is just 21 years old;Her mother, Jacqueline, only 55. By this confession slipped from the preamble which opens, gently, without even realizing it, the doors of his new creation, the playwright and director poses the terms: Mother will be a dive at the bottom of the intimate, to the depths of himself, at the heart, too, of the factory of her memories which are, necessarily, halfway between reality and fiction, in theOne of these gray areas whose mind has the secret and that the artist likes to cultivate.After alone and sisters, and before the creation of father and brothers, this third opus stands out as the most sensitive, moving, and successful aspect, of the domestic cycle that Wajdi Mouawad has been edifying, Pierre by Pierre, for more than ten years.

The memory of her mother, the artist does not reconstitute him in Lebanon, where she spent most of her life, nor in Montreal, where she made her last breath, but in Paris, in this apartment in the 15th arrondissement, located in a dead end near the Boulevard de Grenelle, between the Metros Dupleix and Bir-Hakeim, where she had settled, with her three children, Nayla, Naji and Wajdi, in the late 1970s to flee the war that ravagedhis native land.In her eyes, the place is not a desirable haven of peace, but looks like a temporary shelter that she is about, months after month, to leave to find her country and her husband, abdo, remained toBeirut, under the threat and the bombs, in order to continue to work and send to her family the money she needs to (on) live.Finally, the siblings will stay there for five years, and Jacqueline will never see Lebanon again.

For her, existence on this "land opposite", where she does not find her place, has everything of a Promethean torture, where the pain would eat away, day after day, heart. If she has left Lebanon, Lebanon has never left it, such as a mental shackles, an obsession it would be impossible to get rid of. Her days and nights, Jacqueline lives them in the stove and suspended from calls, sometimes of "aunt" Renée, sometimes of "aunt" Antoinette, and more rarely, she despairs, of her husband, who must compose with regular interruption of telephone lines. Dead of anxiety, she never misses the 20 hours of antenna 2, where Christine Ockrent gives her the latest news, often anxiety -provoking, from her country. So much so that the presenter - who embodies her own role on stage - has become the fifth family member, the one to whom we answer "and bah good evening! When she arrives in the position and who invites herself to the dinner table, as long as Lebanon is on the front page of the news.

Mère de Wajdi Mouawad

Colorful as much as mounted on springs, Jacqueline remains an authoritarian, even tyrannical mother, with her children, Nayla and Wajdi, whom she raises the hard, as if the pain billed everything in her path, y including part of maternal love. Between two slaps, she never hesitates to use them, there to vacuum, there to help her in the kitchen, again to take out the trash. It is that, at her great dam, she also sees them emancipate themselves and, gradually, escape him. Because if France can, in this apartment, only to slip through the lock hole, thanks to Dallas, Goldorak or to Guy Lux shows, and especially to these tubes of the time - sometimes more or less skillfully rewritten and Reinterpreted by Bertrand Cantat, whose artistic contribution to this show aroused a controversy - that, from Salvatore Adamo to Pierre Bachelet, from Julio Iglesias to Serge Gainsbourg, the radio is often, but not always, authorized to spray, she does not Little, his office on the youngest. In Nayla, she gives another model of women, less enslaved and subjected to the desires of their husbands than the Lebanese of the time; In Wajdi, the taste for French history, language and culture which he masters better and better over the years, and which he will make his honey in the future.

This family portrait, the artist does not seek to inscribe it in a strictly realistic dimension. By his almost permanent presence on stage to, by regularly moving some furniture, shape this mental space, he imposes it as a construction, like the result, steeped in fiction, memories, necessarily distorted by time, that a man 53 years can have a life fragment seen through the eyes of a 10 year old child. Basically tinged with nostalgia, the gaze, despite the very heavy context, is tender and the atmosphere paradoxically bright. Ode to the mother, hymn to life, Wajdi Mouawad's play is also a declaration of love to the Lebanese language, despite its more trivial than poetic character. By choosing to literally translate certain idiomatic expressions - such "my darling" which becomes "O you who I hope will be buried" - the playwright tells everything about its emphatic propensity, its symbolic power, but also of the omnipresence of Death and humor, skillfully mixed, as if the second could be played with the first. This language, imagined as a devil, Odette Makhlouf and Aïda Sabra seized with the finesse of mind, and the malice, of the natives. In a scenographic space, designed by Emmanuel Clolus, which takes up the video and scenic codes of only and sisters, they won, alongside the young Emmanuel Abboud - alternating with Théo Akiki, Dany Aridi and Augustin Maîtrehenry - while beautiful restraint , like the patronworks of the scene, capable, the first as a cheeky young woman, the second as a heartbreaking and torn mother, to embody, at the same time, the despair and the vital impulse of a whole people for whom war And unhappiness are, even today, consubstantial of existence.

Vincent Bouquet - www.sceneweb.fr

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