L'Enfant brûlé
[ A Burnt Child ]
based on the novel by Stig Dagerman
directed by Noëmie Ksicova
duration 2h20
Berthier 17e
with Lumîr Brabant, Vincent Dissez, Théo Oliveira Machado, Cécile Péricone and the dog Mésa
Noëmie Ksicova’s theatrical work unfolds, with modesty, in the area of memory, loss, and trace. In her third show, the young director adapts a novel by Stig Dagerman, A Burnt Child. When his mother dies, a twenty-year old son turns his pain into violence and directs it towards the world, with a very adolescent bad faith and restlessness. In the letters he writes to himself, he unloads his fantasies of purity. In his everyday life, he engages in a love-hate fight with his father, and slowly materializes his incestuous impulses. Without judging or indulging, but with much tenderness, Noëmie Ksicova finds her balance on the crest of an unfathomable rupture — or burn. The father, the son, his girlfriend and a fourth character joining them later go around each other in circles in a touching ballet of bodies. Inspired by Bergman’s films, the show orchestrates the weight of absence in the hollow of unsaid things and of gestures choreographed with a musical specificity. It thereby conjures up, on stage and through sound, the dead next to the living.
