“The Nest of Ashes” by Simon Falguières, the island at thirteen o’clock – Liberation

Theater

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–A theater adventure from another age, the play by the young director manages the feat of being galvanizing despite its crazy length, thanks to formidable actors and an elegant scenography.–

Almost all of them remained, during the thirteen hours of the show, the valiant spectators of the ash nest by Simon Falguières, meticulously counted at each return from intermissions and breaks (six in all, during which some sketched out gymnastic stretches), by the leader of the review Sarah with the raised index finger (Camille Constantin Da Silva), who with malice went into ecstasies each time: “They haven’t left!” (laughter in the room). “We are here !” the spectators abounded in the middle.

And when the end came, they jumped up to applaud the troupe, these actors so full of youth and energy, who carried this theatrical epic with uncommon ardor, and some of whom seemed on the verge of tears, during the last greeting, dumbfounded, a little stunned, by what they had been through, by this day and this night of illusion and expense – and us with it. A singular little phalanstery of theater had been created there, on the stage and the bleachers in red velvet of the Fabrica, an island resolutely on the fringes of the world and its constraints, a theatrical adventure as it is hardly done anymore (which other than Julien Gosselin, already in these places, a few years ago?). Which, logically, was the very subject of the show (the golden age, how to return to it), and of which everything that threatens it is found at its very roots: its cut off from the world, its cult of the past . Can the revival of the theatre, of the great popular theatre, not happen…

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