Joy is light, joy is warmth.

It arises from the sparking friction between people who are in a positive relationship with one another.

Friends, relatives, lovers are the protagonists of Arne Lygre's latest play.

In “Tyd for glede” (“Time for Joy”), which premiered in Oslo earlier this year, the Norwegian illustrates how life's hardships can be softened with the help of interpersonal bonds.

"Hardness of life" means here: adultery, miscarriage, loneliness in a foreign country, death of a relative, tension in the family, end of a love relationship, childlessness due to infertility.

Human togetherness, as long as it is based on an attitude that ranges on the scale of feelings between restrained goodwill and flaming love, does not eliminate such hardships.

But it takes the corners and edges away from them: dialogues and group discussions, social gatherings, celebrations and songs let us human monads forget our existential thrown-inness, at least for a moment.

They bring light and warmth into our existence.

Doesn't Lygre's Ode to Joy, created in 2021 by Scandinavian standards, seem a touch Californian with its positive thinking, its fixation on community, its – to use a controversial term – do-gooders?

Be that as it may: The topic is original – and made for the increased need for interpersonal warmth in post-lockdown times.

In formal terms, the piece consists of two rather loosely linked chains of events.

In the first part, a third, then a fourth, and finally an eighth character join a mother and her daughter on a bank by the river;

each of the three groups they belong to brings their own troubles with them.

In the second part, invited and uninvited guests gradually trundle into the apartment of a new protagonist;

No secret salary

At the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe in Paris, Arne Lygre, now a playwright played throughout Europe, was placed on France's theater map in 2007 thanks to a blood-curdling staging of the three-act play "Man without Prospects" by the stage black artist Claude Régy.

Stéphane Braunschweig, the current artistic director of the Odéon-Theater, has not come close to their icy force in any of his five Lygre productions to date.

The youngest drives out the volatile mystery content of “Zeit für Freude” with a conversation piece tone that – too breathless, too naturalistic – puts an end to the light, slight strangeness that flickers up here and there between the lines.

And even compared to Régy's actors of the time - Jean-Quentin Châtelain, Redjep Mitrovitsa, Bulle Ogier - the drop is considerable:

It sounded promising

The second start of the new season at the Odéon was Tiago Rodrigues' production of his own text "Dans la mesure de l'impossible" ("Within the impossible").

Rodrigues has recently been appointed director of the Festival d'Avignon, so that sounds promising on paper in the season's brochure.

But on the stage boards this promise was only fulfilled to a limited extent.

According to the author, "Dans la mesure de l'impossible" was not a documentary, but a "documented" piece, after discussions with around thirty employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins sans frontières.

There they are already standing on the ramp, represented by two actresses and two actors, to whom they address their wishes: “Your play should be about what we sacrifice”, “You could talk about the adrenaline rush in the face of danger”, “It has to about abuse of power".

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The subject of "humanitarian aid" is certainly not commonplace, but the staging of the four-part prologue could hardly be more communal: each actor alternately directs a reply to the audience, while the others wait their turn.

Fourteen monologues follow, almost all of which tell one or more stories from a foreign assignment.

It's about a mutiny at the food distribution, about the complaint of a pedophile colleague, about the difficult choice of the recipient of the only blood bag available, about the unreal silent ceasefire during the recovery of an injured person, about ex-patients who save or steal your life, around storms, smells, mint pots and mass graves.

A white tarpaulin, which covers almost the entire stage, is pulled up with cables over the course of two hours so that it first forms a miniature mountain landscape, then a giant tent roof.

A drummer accompanies the stories with a soft growl, light wooden clicks, drum rolls;

a four-part epilogue, which is a mirror image of the beginning, concludes the performance.

Deserted ruins

The whole thing is effective on stage, and thanks to longer passages in English and Portuguese it is also suitable for touring.

But where the humanitarian workers had emphasized in the interview how difficult it was to convey their experiences, Rodrigues chose the easiest way.

A lot of things here seem irritatingly comfortable: repeated winks in the direction of the hall to emphasize the "theatricality" of the narrative dispositif, theatrical commonplaces such as tears in the voice for emotion and drooling roars for outrage, even phrases like "tragic death", "deserted ruins", " merciless power of absence".

The extraordinary material deserved a more imaginative treatment than this lazy formatting.

So all expectations are now resting on the third start of the Paris season opener: on Thomas Ostermeier's imminent production of Shakespeare's "King Lear" at the Comédie-Française.