Die Sonne [The Sun]

In the beginning was the lie...
Olivier Py

How to once again find, after the ordeal of nothingness, the gush of joy that comes from the word? After his portrait of Mitterrand, Py once again, in Sonne (The Sun), takes up with the most intimate sources of his inspiration. And he has chosen to do so in German, with performers from the Volksbühne (whereas Castorf will be working with French actors and actresses at the Odéon). A theatrical company, which is also in part a family, sees its destiny and its desires  brought to white heat pitch by its encounter with a bizarre stranger in whom are projected or incarnated all the energies and desires of youth. Where does Axel come from, this person whose very name suggests that the entire world is made to turn around him? Did he spring from the earth or from water, is he a sailor’s son or that of a gravedigger? Sex, laughter, beauty, poetry, creation: Axel radiates, burns with all these, swallows up life whole. When the curtain rises, he has on the makeup of a god, the one who shouts out in “The Legend of the Ages” (La Légende des siècles) “Make way, everybody! I am Pan; Jupiter! On your knees.” All those who love him follow him, and, dazzled, transported, satellites of this flamboyant sun, they all love him: nothing, nobody can resist his blazing incandescence. To worship him Mathias wants to make him an offering of his pain; to seduce him Charly dances in a dress and dreams of becoming a woman. Even the one who should stake a claim to being his rival in love and poetry, Joseph, the too assiduous and responsible author, the serious person, the skeptic, yes, even Joseph, “winter’s child forgotten in the ruins,” lets himself be carried away by the freedom inspired by the one who shares Senta’s love with him – Axel – who could perhaps be the father of the child she is carrying – and yet who dreams, in a “disordering of all the senses,” which is also the devouring of all lives, of marrying Elena, thus becoming the father-in-law of this Joseph who resists him in vain!..Those who know Py’s work will rediscover here the themes he has constantly returned to since he began writing for the stage – especially, woven into the motif of art as a vital demand, the red thread of transmission, sharing and paternity.