And bang! A man is dead. A man had to die. But is it really the right one? The useful dead, the one that had to be used to solve some small problems? The humor crushes and delights in this gem of the Russian repertoire that it is suicidesby Nicolaï Erdman, which we were particularly pleased to find at the Comédie-Française, in a production by Stéphane Varupenne, one of the troupe’s actors. Tired! This Suicide he seemed very slow, shooting himself in the foot by staying afloat on the vaudeville size of the piece.
Nicolaï Erdman wrote this comedy between 1928 and 1929, as Stalinist Russia began to descend into terror, highlighting both the totalitarian excesses of the ongoing revolution and the mediocrity of the petty bourgeois spirit. In accordance with the great comedies of Gogol, the author unfolds black, acid and absurd Russian humor at its peak. He paid dearly for it: upon its publication in 1930, the play was banned by the censors. Nicolaï Erdman would live in relegation until 1949, when he was allowed to return to Moscow and would write nothing more of significance. Only in 1990 suicides finally he went to Russia.
The play therefore has a somewhat mythical aura, and in recent years, with the emergence of a new form of terror in Russia, it has returned to the scene. However, it is not easy to stage. His political and metaphysical funds and double funds make up his greatness, behind the mechanics of vaudeville à la Labiche. It all starts with a domestic scene, in Communal (the community apartment) where Semyon Semionovitch, the play’s antihero, lives. And it all begins with one major problem: hunger—which is as important to Erdman as it is to Brecht at the same time, as the anthropological driving force of the war of all against all.
Behind closed doors, no privacy
Sémione, an ordinary little man, devirilized and discredited since he became unemployed, wakes his wife in the middle of the night because he wants to eat liver sausage. The wife sends him away and suddenly Sémione threatens to kill himself. From there, a crazy mechanism begins, in the closed door without privacy where the characters live. The news that a man wants to die spreads like wildfire through all levels of society. Suicide, once dead, will have to speak, in a world where the living no longer have the right to speak. All pressure groups in Moscow will therefore try to appropriate Semione’s postmortem message: religion, intellectuals, bourgeois who defend romantic love and fine linen or artisan butchers.
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