The assassination of Father Hamel: first readings of a tragedy – 29/07/2018



[ad_1]

 The scene of the badbadination: striking. / Photo Studio Guillaume.

The scene of the badbadination: striking. / Photo Studio Guillaume.

If "Temple", the play written by Jean-Marie Besset, comes under the theater, it is still in the making. The first was played Friday evening in the heart of the cloister of the abbey, in Saint-Hilaire, as part of the festival New Writers in High Valley of Aude.

First observation: the delivery did not have Nava's basic rule is that it is an experimental laboratory of read texts, and thus of characters who rush through a setting in space in order to find their marks which, later, will be part of a staging. It is thus about characters who seek themselves, grope, before incarnating.

A documentary

But Friday night, the setting in space did not allow to suppose an embryo of staging future (one may be mistaken) and with the exception of a few promising snapshots, the actors read mostly their texts, at the limit of the recitation. Some tirades even seemed mechanical, at the expense of any attempt to incarnate.

If "Temple" was to be compared to a planet, then Friday, the audience discovered a period before perhaps a big bang … that we hope. And this, with all the more impatience that the subject is tragically topical: the badbadination on July 26, 2016, of Father Jacques Hamel. The act was perpetrated by two young radicalized Islamists, even inside the church where the unfortunate priest officiated: the ignominy in all its horror.

A murder committed in cold blood by fanatics, two believers lost in a misguided faith, gangrened by extremism, a demonic pathology in which all religions have sunk at some point in their history (or several times).

On this point, the text of J.-M .Besset is clear, even pedagogical and relevant. Precisely, and here we touch the crux of the problem, "Temple" is like documentary theater as there are documentary films.

The play sums up quite well all that the general public could read about radical Islamism through the media and books. But this "infos" side gives the text a cerebral hue, which hinders the interiority of the characters, their psychological thickness, their humanity.

Beautiful performance

For example, we would have liked to see a more Foucaldian Jacques Hamel ( Charles de Foucauld), enlightened by an energetic, carnal faith, coming from the depths of his being, a radiant, luminous, inspiring mystic, rather than a man reciting his profession of faith. What would become of Father Hamel in the hands of a T.S.Eliot, creator of a memorable Thomas Becket ("Murder in the Cathedral")? But the role will surely be refined over the rehearsals.

In contrast, the two actors who embody the terrorists are thoroughly. Good performance ! The role is not obvious. Thanks to them, we discover the crazy trajectory of what Hannah Arendt, once again, could have called "the bbadity of evil."

Essentials t

[ad_2]
Source link