with Claude Duparfait
and on screen Mina Kavani

Célie Pauthe and Claude Duparfait have long shared a passion for Thomas Bernhard’s work. Together, they staged Des arbres à abattre (Cutting Timber: An Irritation), the famous novel by the great Austrian writer. This time, it is a brief and gripping short story, Oui (Yes), that prompted their theatrical craving. Two beings, almost crushed with loneliness, meet in a lost village in Upper Austria: a man, the narrator, shut in his obsessions and his misanthropy; a woman, "the Persian," the foreign partner of a rich businessman who has come there to build a concrete house — that looks just like a prison. What happens between them as they walk in the forest of larches? Can they cure and save each other? Bernhard dissects the hopes and failures of their relationship. From this raw material, Célie Pauthe and Claude Duparfait create a show about the longing for the "vital being," abandonment, and the risk of cruelty that any intimate relationship entails.

Cast

translation Jean-Claude Hémery
stage design Guillaume Delaveau
lighting Sébastien Michaud
sound Aline Loustalot
video François Weber
costumes Anaïs Romand
assistant director Antoine Girard

film,
with Mina Kavani and Claude Duparfait
writing Claude Duparfait and Célie Pauthe
direction Célie Pauthe
director of photography Irina Lubtchansky

production Centre dramatique national Besançon Franche-Comté

Thomas Bernhard is represented by L'Arche, agence théâtrale www.arche-editeur.com

creation in October 2023

Biographies

Célie Pauthe has always been interested in modern and contemporary writing: her career as a director began with Ponge, Müller, Bergman, and Bernhard. She subsequently staged O'Neill's Long Journey from Day to Night, James and Duras' The Beast in the Jungle and The Sickness of Death, and adapted Christine Angot's Un amour impossible (2017), which was presented at the Ateliers Berthier, where she also directed Racine's Bérénice (2018) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (2022). In opera, she is directing Strauss's The Bat, and in 2022, Philippe Leroux's L'Annonce faite à Marie after Claudel. Since 2013, she has directed the Centre dramatique national de Besançon.


Claude Duparfait has performed in shows by Jacques Nichet, François Rancillac, Bernard Sobel, Anne-Laure Liégeois, Michael Thalheimer, Stanislas Nordey and Pascal Rambert. Since their joint beginnings at the École de Chaillot, he has developed a long-term artistic partnership with Stéphane Braunschweig, who has often directed him, notably at the Odéon, in L'École des femmes and Comme tu me veux by Pirandello. He has published and staged Idylle à Oklahoma after Franz Kafka. He is the author of La Fonction Ravel, co-directed with Célie Pauthe, with whom he also wrote Des arbres à abattre (Trees to cut down) after Bernhard, which won him the Syndicat de la critique's interpretation prize.