Paris (AFP)

Imagine that four of your plays are playing in Paris, at the same time, after being sold out for years. This is the case of Alexis Michalik, prodigy of French theater who returns with a new creation, the fruit of a mourning love.

The "Wonder boy" of the French scene, as the press has called him, is the man of ten Molières (including six as author and director), only 37 years old.

After about 8,000 performances in France and abroad of his first four pieces, almost without interruption, he created "Une histoire d'amour" at La Scala-Paris (January 9-March 28), has just published his first novel and will soon be showing two films.

"I am hyperactive," he smiles in an interview with AFP. "My pace of work is as fast as that of my shows".

We have to believe that since this first play, "Le Porteur d'Histoire" (2011), still playing after a record of 2,500 performances, until "Edmond" (2016), which tells the story of the play " Cyrano de Bergerac "by Edmond Rostand and who dedicated Michalik as a" success story ", everything smiles on the playwright with intense blue eyes. Or almost.

"One day, I found myself in the middle of a somewhat difficult break ... I wanted to tell that", he says, inspired by the song "It Takes Time To Be a Man" American group The Rapture.

- "Edge" theater -

His play "speaks of the intimate, not of me," he says. "An author, from the moment he writes something sincere, always ends up writing about his faults, his pains".

She tells the love of Katia and Justine, who disappears a few days after the birth of their daughter conceived by artificial insemination. For this creation, Michalik will go back on stage to play Katia's brother. "It's terrifying, it's been eight years since the last time," said the man who started his career as an actor.

Liking "to surprise" the public, he is adept at "drawers" and stories "where we don't know where we're going to go".

In France, according to him, the narrative had been left aside a little in the theater until the appearance of author-directors like Wajdi Mouawad.

In a country where private theater and subsidized theater are well separated, he is pleased that "for a few years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of a" border "theater, which often comes from the Avignon off festival and which creates (pieces) with a realistic economy, a strong narration and without headliners ".

A recipe which, according to him, allows the pieces to run longer at home and abroad. "The History Carrier", with "five stools and five actors", has thus toured from New Caledonia to Lebanon and will soon be in China.

- "Hybrid shows" -

Cantor of popular theater, he knows that, in certain circles, one can look down on this kind of play which "does not need to tackle heavy or political themes".

"I don't want everyone to like my plays," says the playwright, who has sometimes been criticized for certain facilities. "There are bound to be people who prefer a more demanding theater (...) and that's fine."

His first novel, "Far" (Albin Michel), is also a twist: the story of a young man who crosses Europe in search of his father.

Franco-British - his English mother Pamela Hargreaves translated some of his plays performed in 2019 in Great Britain -, he fed on this double culture. "My narration is rather Anglo-Saxon but I speak of very French subjects".

"I stole this simplicity from Peter Brook, the choreographed side of Mnouchkine where she brings all her actors to change the decor", but "my narration borrows from TV series and comics". "It gives hybrid shows".

© 2020 AFP