Let us thank Laurence Arpi for having by her setting in daring, but respectful scene of the deep sense of work, made obvious the modernity and the timelessness of the incursion of Gracq to the theatre and for having returned justice with the one of its principal contributions: the concrete direction of the marvellous one.

                                                                    Bertrand Fillaudeau, current directing of Editions CORTI.

                                                                         click here to read the testimony of Bertrand Fillaudeau.

         Written in 1942, the part of Julien Gracq undergoes a hard failure during its creation in 1949. It is represented sometimes since but bad guard presses; a text considered difficult to go up and whose author does not grant any more the rights but with parsimony.
         As of his reading however, I am touched and inspired. There is, through a very literary writing, an attractive and universal bottom: it is about a myth. With the agreement of the author, I endeavour to reactualize the writing by keeping the force of the matter and while removing what makes it verbeux too much like it says Julien Gracq itself. There remains the initiatory tale in the purity of its lines with all its atemporelle wisdom. The legend of Graal is centred at one decisive time: the meeting enters the young knight Perceval and Amfortas, the king who keeps the sacred vessel. Perceval refuses the suffering, the weakness, darkness. He believes in the possibility of a sun without spot, of a light without shade
         Amfortas enracine its reign in its vulnerability of man and not in its crowned power of King of Graal, it includes the suffering in its power, the vulnerability in its capacity and humanity in its divine statute.
         The interest of the part does not hold in its dramatic tension not born from the action and its bounces as in a more traditional drama, but in what is known as between the characters and who has a value symbolic system: it is an initiation, i.e. a mystery carrying truths valid for any being in any time. We are plunged in a universe at the border of reality and symbolic system like writes it Julien Gracq, and by deciphering the enigma of Graal with Perceval, we include/understand what concerns us in an intimate way.
         The setting in scene sticks before very making the text alive and accessible by privileging the life from the characters on the philosophical aspect, by integrating dance, song, music and a work of actors based on the body and its energy.
                                                                                       Laurence Arpi
                                                                director

 

Click here for the Press review of the first of King Pêcheur.