Droll Lectures

Droll Lectures Jean-Yves Lazennec (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus Rather than speaking of "theatricality"—an ambiguous term with seemingly uncertain connotations—I would like to propose a few paths for reflection on those elements in Lydie Salvayre's writings that participate in theater itself—what her writing summons expressly from the theater, as well as what the practice of theater can reveal in its turn. The following will take into account my interest and work as a stage director (metteur en scène) for two texts that I brought to the stage, and which invoke very particularly the theater: Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers, which toured throughout France in 1999 and 2001, and La Conférence de Cintegabelle, which was the subject of public readings in the summer of 2003 with Roland Bertin, honorary member of the Comédie Française, who will be working with us on another production, scheduled to open in early 2005 in Paris and on tour. What makes this writing pertinent for the theater strikes me as three-fold: a singular method of "speaking up," a language that demands orality, and an urgent quest for the other, summoned in his silence. With these two texts we are confronted with a singular mechanism of address. In fact, the nature of the "speaking up" is each time that of "a lecture." Now, here is a form that can be classed a priori as opposite to the dramatic monologue, and in this instance, supposedly in the most transparent language imaginable. Master Echinard, the teacher of the student bailiffs, thinks he is describing the Law, and properly speaking (this is important in the theater) he is what he says he is: "a lecturer." But when, without realizing it, he becomes this "lecturer" in his own mind, he catapults us into a dizzying vertigo. The dramatic monologue, on the contrary, summons up a fiction, deploying the speaker's subjectivity according to a certain number of recognized literary procedures—fable, expression of feelings, or biographical and psychological allusions aimed at arousing the empathy of an audience taken as witness and more or less called upon to identify with the speaker. There is also the outpouring of a personal story that may include intimate confessions, and often assumes the implicitness (though scarcely implicit) of an audience that has come to hear someone who "speaks alone" in the theater's "four-walled" space, where the audience is the "fourth wall." [End Page 30] In a lecture, and more particularly in those of Lydie Salvayre, there is none of this. No fiction, no characters who develop, but a powerful play upon the "effect of reality" surrounding the lecture format itself, and the properly theatrical consequences that such a device (unassailable in its referents) can reveal. The lecture, as a convention of public address (categorized, known to all, and with no need for theater in order to take place) assumes a new register in Lydie Salvayre, becoming something monstrous, where "speaking up" implodes. We pass from a stage setting without fiction to a fiction of the stage—the supposedly neutral lecture hall. From that moment, the theater of self and the theater of the world burst in unimpeded. At that moment, a man speaks to other assembled men, not with the aim of convincing or of teaching, but simply because he cannot do otherwise—he is overcome by the irrepressible need to bear witness in front of others to his indignation over and his love for this world that has us in its grasp. However, when this speaker says "I," it is always "we" that is understood, and we feel that we are in the presence of a certain kind of epic theater, an open form where humor and intelligence nourish each other to develop a gesture that is both ludic and critical. Hence the effect of astonishment, when the distancing supposed by the lecture's address protocol is progressively turned inside-out, like a glove. In Cintegabelle, the rigidity of the principles overlaps Lulu's overflowing analphabetism, and what is "serious" all the way to the end only becomes more pathetic and derisory by this very posture [tenue]. One holds a

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