Baal

"Everything interests me from the moment when I can gobble it", says Baal, the hero with the same name as the Phoenician god who gave the night back its colours. This universal devouring is also that of the young Brecht at the end of World War I, when human slaughter had come to an end and everything had to be rebuilt on the ruins of a European civilisation that people had wrongly believed was pacified and carried humanistic and progressive values. At the time, he wrote 58 pages of raw poetry. Fifty-eight pages that had the odour of the nihilism of a young man that nothing could stop in his mad race toward pleasures, in his quest for freedom, in his need to passionately live each moment of an existence whose tragic end he perceived ahead of time. An unfinished play, Baal is built by successive fragments: 28 scenes organised like a theatre puzzle that François Orsoni seizes with his troupe of actors-singers. Not attempting to make coherent a dramaturgy that isn't, they explore scene by scene the possibilities offered by this text, unique in Brecht's work, and by music, imagined by Tomas Heuer, a former member of the band Bérurier Noir. It is at the heart of intimacy that this chaotic voyage takes place. An intimacy that has become a show, collectively sharable, disturbing because it is immodest, fascinating because it is generous, moving because it is sincere and tragic. This announced, and assumed, suicide, through a practice of every possible pleasure at each second of a life that one does not try to protect, is essentially a poet's gesture, a formidable sneer at those who are reassured by respecting God and the law, a fable driven by a vital force immoderately consumed. François Orsoni has given the role of Baal to an actress, Clotilde Hesme. A faithful companion in his theatre adventures, who assumes her force and fragility on stage, equal to a Baal who, even while playing, never cheats. An actress to "distance", to go beyond the conventional imaged of the cursed poet and to question masculinity and femininity in another way. JFP