Philoctetes

A masterpiece too rarely performed, in a language, whose force and shimmer have been reinvented by Jean-Pierre Siméon. Already in 1992, Christian Schiaretti approached Sophocles by presenting a highly acclaimed adaptation of Ajax/Philoctetes. After directing Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Overboard by Michel Vinaver - two performances that respectively won the Georges-Lerminier Prize and the Grand Prix du Syndicat de la Critique for best play of the year, and both of which were nominated for the Molières du théâtre public in 2009 (the French Tonys),, - his return to the great tragedies of Greek theater is long awaited. So much more so, because it marks a new step in the artistic collaboration and companionship of Schiaretti and Jean-Pierre Siméon. Author of forty books, a distinguished poet, winner of a number of prizes, novelist, critic, essayist, Jean-Pierre Siméon worked alongside Christian Schiaretti at the Comédie in Reims (of which he was the « associate poet» for five years), then at the Théâtre national Populaire de Villeurbanne. From this Piloctetes, that he characterizes as a « variation on Sophocles » and that « rather faithfully follows the intentions of the play », the poet confides that it is a « a total rewriting, a re-appropriation of the original object in a different language : which means not that it is from Greek to French, but from one poetry to another. So it is not a more or less well adjusted equivalence, but a metamorphosis. »
The plot of this « variation » is worth telling. The experienced Ulysses, assigns a mission to the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles : steal the bow and arrows of Philoctetes, without which, Troy cannot be taken. In order to do so, he will have to be cunning - these divine weapons, inherited from Hercules, make Philoctetes invincible. But Philoctetes, who is wounded and incurable, has never forgiven the Greeks (and amongst them Ulysses), from having abandoned him nine years earlier on a deserted island so that they would no longer have to hear his screams and the stench of his wound. Only Neoptolemus can possibly hope to gain the trust of the old warrior, because he is the only one to have not been a member of the Greek army at that time. And so Achilles' noble son must lie to the wounded man and make him believe that he too has hated the Greeks ever since they refused to give him the weapons of his dead father, which were instead given to...Ulysses. This subtle initiation ordeal for the young warrior, caught in a conflict of contradicting duties, is made twice as forceful through one of the most poignant portraits of all, that of a man humiliated because of his suffering, abandoned by his own men to absolute, terrifying solitude, and who, nine years later, sees the faces of his traitorous friends only to be betrayed once again. One can understand why Laurent Terzieff was tempted by this role : it will undoubtedly be a new pinnacle for an artist whose incredibly fruitful career has already spanned more than half a century.