Paris (AFP)
He goes back on stage to play an old actor confronted with a deserted theater, when the rooms are still half empty.
But for Jacques Weber, the health crisis is an opportunity to rethink the theater.
"The problem is not the mask. We must stop saying + it's horrible +. The question is + what are we doing? +. We must act!", Declares the comedian of 71 years old with a long career, one of the most striking roles on the boards was Cyrano de Bergerac.
"I know that I am privileged and that there are people in this profession much more precarious than me, I have no right to complain. But I have a duty like others to think about ways to do the theater differently, ”he adds.
From Tuesday, he plays in Anton Tchekhov's "Crisis of nerves: three farces" at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris, directed by a specialist in the Russian writer, the German Peter Stein.
The room, scheduled for the spring, had been postponed due to confinement.
Coincidentally, the first short play, "Swan song", tells the story of an old actor waking up after a drunken time in an empty theater, a text in which Chekhov questions the theater and its fragility.
"The problem today is not whether we play well or badly. It is (rather to wonder about) the place of the theater in the world. With the epidemic, it is high time that we this question arises, different from that of career, ”says the actor.
"We cannot be satisfied with having only 1% of the population going to the theater, we cannot remain silent in front of the fact that people prefer more and more broadcasting to the art of live, to the game" .
- Paris-Beirut -
Why not try experiences outside the walls, "in green spaces, heritage places, atypical places", so that the public does not always go "to the same rooms", he suggests.
Jacques Weber cites, for example, a play performed by Audrey Bonnet on the quays of the Seine, where the spectators wore headphones to listen to the dialogue in an "intimate" way, which he attended at the end of the summer.
With the health crisis, the theater and the arts were considered “a luxury”, he notes.
But he reminds us that if the scene does not change the world, it does lead to reflection.
And in its long history, "the theater has always overcome the tests", even if this epidemic and its uncertainties severely affect the financial situation of many theaters.
Sign of the fragility of the recovery, the Théâtre de la Colline announced Friday the suspension of rehearsals of the new creation of the playwright Pascal Rambert, "My brothers", after a member of the artistic team tested positive for Covid -19.
In addition to his theatrical comeback, Jacques Weber published an autobiographical work entitled "Paris-Beyrouth" which recounts his experience during the shooting of a film in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, in the 1980s. He was then 33 years old and went to Beirut for a film, pushed by the director Jocelyne Saab, after having been released by her voice while playing Cyrano.
"I wanted to get out of this hell and paradise that was Cyrano ... I came across a totally destroyed and totally charming city, a country so sweet and so madly damaged", he says.
A book that appears a few weeks after the explosion on August 4 at the port of Beirut which left nearly 200 dead and considerable damage.
"Terrible", murmurs the actor, who admits to being "extremely embarrassed" by this coincidence of timing: the release - long anticipated - of a book relating "a primarily personal story" and the tragic situation of a country and its people.
© 2020 AFP