The party is sad, unfortunately, and the characters present definitely haven’t read all the books. Of Platonov by Chekhov, which he adapts very freely, Cyril Teste creates a long evening that becomes empty, then tragic – tragic through the force of emptiness. As in The films of Ruben Östlundbut with more elegance and less cynicism, the director brings out the monsters from a great sick collective body, tainted to the core by the obsession with money. To the point where love and friendship became impossible.
But everything seems to start in the gaiety and carefreeness of a summer evening, on the big empty stage, without decor, where big tables and a small platform have been set up for the musician who will liven up the evening with disco hits and good old rock standards. The host is Anna, a young widow “not disgusting”as the male characters in the play say about her. She is in debt and doesn’t know how she will be able to keep her house. All around her are the pits, who want her, want their house, or both, that would be better.
So he’ll dance the night away with a side of “finish the horses well” while all around him something is corrupting, breaking and collapsing in this little provincial society. The catalyst, the disruptive agent, the dark star of the play, is Platonov, “little Plato,” here nicknamed Micha: he will shatter marriages, including his own, by bringing out the ferocity of fathers toward sons—sons who themselves struggle. to escape mediocrity – he will throw away any feelings he might have, including those towards him. It carries a sterile lucidity, as it would a toxic virus.
Wild ritual
The cleverness of Cyril Teste and the actor who plays Platonov, the excellent Vincent Berger, is to make him a character without any brilliance, almost absent from himself in his enterprise of destruction and self-destruction, in this world that required only a short movement. enter in a drop.
Continuing his research on There “film performance”a concept invented by him, Cyril Teste weaves the cinema-theatre dialogue in an exciting way, as always, in the first two parts of the show, while in the last, the theater alone takes over, to give free rein to a kind of wild ritual, in which the characters disfigure. , he animalizes himself, with all the masks removed.
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