Events show – Isabelle Huppert disturbs by announcing the end of a world

With its street lights in bloom gliding on rails, this “Cerisaie” has the dimensions of a station hall: huge, capable of accommodating all of humanity. Or those in a theater right next to a train station, stage and grandstands included, as the seats placed on the first correspond to the armchairs in line with the second. As he usually does, Tiago Rodrigues includes far around. After putting his luggage in the Pope’s courtyard last summer, he unpacks the content again in this Comedy, where he feels a little at home. He will later open his suitcases in Vienna or Taiwan. If he universalizes Anton Chekhov’s acting one more notch, it is because he is convinced that we all have an experience in us. “Kirsebærhaven”.

For what is this property which such a complex family as it is destroyed must say goodbye to, if not the anchorage from which all sooner or later must detach themselves? Planet, homeland or native hut that leaves us the identity that we constantly have to redefine on the ontological path of exile? Through the sale of the estate, where Lioubov, arriving from Paris, meets for the last time, his daughters Varia and Ania, his brother Leonid, his valet Yacha, the teacher Petia, the parasite Boris, the governor Charlotta, the accountant Semione, Douniacha the maid, Firs the old chamberlain, and especially Lopakhine, the released serf who must redeem the earth, it is also about the course of history in motion that D^r Chekhov and his assistant Rodrigues bowed over our souls. The orchard, which every spring is adorned with white, is nothing more than a knife touched in the wound of young people who never return – both individuals and groups.

Pyramid dimensions

If the staging of the future master of Avignon diverts the melancholy that usually hovers over the household, towards rock, motleyness and agitation, it faithfully recreates the temperament of the main characters. From this, the promoter Lopakhine stands out, as the French-Senegalese Adama Diop gives a vivid and luminous dimension: instead of the vengeful upstart, he incarnates the new Russian middle class from the 20th century, conscious of his past as a slave. , confident of its future reforms. And above all, stands out from the passive Lioubov, always on the ridge between joy and despair, sometimes frivolous or speechless, who with a fictitious intoxication suppresses the pain of having lost his young son and his lover soon after, as Isabelle Huppert living with the real estate class we know him.

A success, therefore, that this “cherry plantation” brings together Portugal and Russia, but also north and south? Undeniably in its ambition to worry the audience on the four cardinal points. Alas, this effort has the consequence of reducing the so-called bystanders, which Chekhov nevertheless ascribed to a completely democratic value. We regret, for example, that we have not been able to become more attached to the young Ania (delicious Alison Valence) and her revolutionary fiancée Petia (no less delicious David Geselson), who remain when the cherry trees have given in. . dachas sold to summer guests. Tiago Rodrigues has a clear sense of priorities: would he be willing to overlook details on their behalf?

Posted: 11-03-2022, 20:38

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