Coming across a wise writer friend by chance, he confided to me that he wanted to settle down “elsewhere”. Elsewhere than in France, elsewhere than in the West, outside of this frankly hysterical polarization, where even those whose ideas he shared formulated them with such dogma, got stuck in such a mud of denial and ideology, that he couldn’t even stand to hear their arguments anymore… Not to mention the camp “opposite”. Where to take refuge? I repeated to myself over and over again as I left the writer friend, where can we find fertile ground for contradiction, for debate, for otherness, for freedom? Or live ? I asked myself. Until the evening when I found a luminous response and intense emotion in Yasmina Reza. Live and find refuge in the words and characters of Yasmina Reza, in her desire to never close doors, to embrace all humanity, the absurd, the stupid, the brilliant, the incoherent, the wicked , from childhood, from the popular, from the squeaky. What does it matter if James Brown wore curlers*, what does it matter if madness and solitude are always at home in man. What remains, connects us, will never be anything other than: “…Give me your hand”.
First there is the child Jacob. The child who makes everyone smile, when he dresses up as Céline Dion and sings playback to her hits. And then there is the child who grows up and becomes Celine Dion. Like an obtuse refusal to leave childhood and the omnipotence of the imagination as well as play, trouble and possibilities. There is the rest home where Jacob/Céline is interned and his parents, Lionel and Pascaline, who, as overwhelmed as they are loving, as touching as they are funny, are received by a woke psychiatrist, who never brakes in a car, because “braking it’s capitulating.” Psy who holds a conference and appears (and disappears) in a black frame which shrinks until it is nothing more than a very small rectangle (a brilliant directing find among many others) but who nevertheless convinces with his proofreading of Cinderella from Grimm, where the two sisters are mercilessly punished for being neither beautiful nor good, because “in a narrative where only the beautiful and good are worthy of a king, they have no chance”.
There is Philippe who becomes friends with Jacob/Céline, Philippe who is white but who believes he is black, words of a psychologist: “When he arrived, he declared himself West Indian but since then he has identified with a black diasporic world, more global let’s say, with a slight African-American tropism without seriousness”. And then, there is life which is suffocated in our fierce desire to find a place, to find meaning, to take root. To do what ? There is Philippe’s sycamore, which only has branches on one side. It’s hard on him, Philippe, these bastard branches, he wants to turn the tree over so that it is “less wobbly, more elegant”. Jacob/Céline protests: “It’s his life, he’s like that. He’s organized himself. He doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Finally, they decide to bury him in the grounds of the Rest House, clandestinely, disturbing a place where everything is in its place. And then, for fear that the sycamore would be uprooted, Philippe follows it to the great displeasure of the psychologist: “I would have liked Lionel and Pascaline to meet you differently than with shackles on the wrists like your unfortunate ancestors”, while Lionel does not can no longer play the comedy of finding normal what seems abnormal to him: “But why do you have to be someone else? You are Jacob Hunter. Like me, your father, I am Lionel Hunter. That’s enough for me to stand up. People call me Lionel, I don’t need to know who I am.”
Yasmina Reza is eternal
To stand up, to put down roots, to seek love or approval, to resist childhood which fades away into the mist, despite all our subterfuges to still retain a few slivers of it, a nickname from the time of milk teeth, a memory of garlands, sparkling artifices to hold back what flees towards solitude and death.
Yasmina Reza is eternal. She is an organic playwright who gives us neither lessons, nor antidotes, nor consolations. She cruelly reminds us “that we cannot sing our joy in a vacuum”. And it’s enough to give and take an unknown hand as time passes.
*James Brown put on curlers, by Yasmina Reza (Flammarion).
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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