with
Mithkal Alzghair
Alexandra Gentil
David Gouhier
Émilie Incerti Formentini
Manon Kneusé
Yohan Lopez
Stéphanie Marc
Cyril Metzger
Leïla Muse
Alix Riemer
Maxime Thebault
Étienne Toqué

An institution for the mentally ill. A dozen suffering beings, of all ages, roam about... Nothing funny? Yet they manage to make us smile sometimes. It's absurd, but that's life. In fact, according to Julie Duclos, « perhaps we were this close to end up in there ». The director comes back to the Odéon with a « modern-day fresco », enlivened by the poetic, razor-sharp langage of Sweden’s most important contemporary playwright. How is one to live apart from oneself? As Lars Norén's characters arrange the fragments of their wounded stories, a musical composition seems to emerge from the chaos. Images projected on the walls of the ward sometimes enlarge their space – outwards, opening up escapes towards « an Eden or a breath of air », or inwards, revealing glimpses of intimacy, « catching poetry where it went unsuspected ».

Cast

traduction Camilla Bouchet, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Arnaud Roig-Mora
scenography Matthieu Sampeur
collaboration on the scenography Alexandre de Dardel
light Dominique Bruguière
video Quentin Vigier
sound Samuel Chabert
costumes Lucie Ben Bâta Durand
technical coordination Sébastien Mathé
director assistant Antoine Hirel

 

production L’in-quarto

coproduction Théâtre national de Bretagne, Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Les Gémeaux – scène nationale de Sceaux, Comédie de Reims, ThéâtredelaCité – centre dramatique national Toulouse Occitanie, Le Cratère – scène nationale Alès, Théâtre des Célestins – Lyon, Centre dramatique national Besançon Franche-Comté

avec le soutien du ministère de la Culture – Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Île-de-France, de l’École d’art dramatique Lille / Tourcoing et de l’École du Théâtre national de Bretagne – centre européen théâtral et chorégraphique

avec le soutien du Jeune théâtre national

la compagnie est conventionnée par le ministère de la Culture – Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Île-de-France

avec le soutien du Cercle de l’Odéon

la pièce est publiée à L’Arche, sous le titre Crises, dans la traduction française de Camilla Bouchet, Jean-Louis Martinelli, Arnaud Roig-Mora

Biography of Julie Duclos

Actress and director Julie Duclos trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (class of 2010). She presented her first show there: Fragments d'un discours amoureux, based on a play by Roland Barthes. In 2012, she created Masculin/ Féminin, a work in progress in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are freely explored. Two years later she reunited with the same group of actors to direct (in collaboration with Guy-Patrick Sainderichin) Nos Serments, based on Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain, at the Théâtre national de la Colline. It was also at La Colline, where she was associate artist from 2015 to 2017, that she staged MayDay, by Dorothée Zumstein (2015) and Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck (2019), which premiered at the Avignon Festival. The show is presented at the Odéon in 2020, where she returns two years later with Lars Norén's Kliniken. Julie Duclos is an associate artist at the Théâtre national de Bretagne in Rennes.