A few reasons to be interested and quite a few others to be annoyed await the viewer The Burnt Child, directed by Noëmie Ksicova at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris. In the program, the artist, who adapted the novel by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), takes the lead: “I’m not sure Dagerman fans will be very happy with this adaptation”she writes, specifying: “From the start, I had the intuition that his language was too beautiful for us to live together. »
The confession has the merit of frankness, even if it makes you jump: why should the beauty of a piece of writing be an obstacle to its theatricalization? The sovereignty of a production is not in dispute. Cut, prune, transform, rewrite: the artist has all the rights. But the work carried out by Noëmie Ksicova on the story of an author described as “Rimbaud of the North” has the appearance of an evasion. Like, finally, a staging which remains frozen at the door of promises whose threshold it does not cross.
However, history encourages us to slide down the slopes of the irrational. Bengt (Théo Oliveira Machado) is an inconsolable and jealous young man, whom the early death of his mother precipitates violent impulses. His girlfriend, Bérit (Lumîr Brabant), his father, Knut (Vincent Disent), Gun (Cécile Péricone), his father’s mistress (and future wife), and even Mésa, Gun’s dog: not one escapes to the rage of the bereaved son. It results at best in asphyxiating silences, at worst in devastating acts of violence: beatings, rapes, attempted suicide and – the end of the end of perversity – a guilty affair with Gun, motivated by a desire that one guesses largely Oedipal.
A potential psychopath
Suffice to say that the atmosphere is nauseating and the atmosphere heavy. From this point of view, the show does not betray the text. His scrupulous deployment irritates the nerves to the point that we would like to put an end to this young man whose obsession with “purity” (the word comes up often in his mouth) worries more than it reassures. Bengt is not a sweet, grieving dreamer, but a potential psychopath.
His nuisance capacity is monitored by Noëmie Ksicova, who gives him time to manifest himself by extending the minutes. Two hours and twenty minutes of a performance where, between two silences, anecdotal or decisive scenes intervene. This is well seen. Madness is not selective: it sneaks into every corner of everyday life. However, the threat, whether it lies in what is left unsaid or is carried out in gestures, does not exert on the public this insidious pressure which should make the spectacle uncomfortable.
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