A la Renverse

One July afternoon, a couple is picnicking with their son Raphaël, a young au pair, and the father's best friend, Vincent. Raphaël, aged 5, is looking for dragonflies. But he stumbles and falls into the river. Vincent saves Raphaël. Back on the bank, he holds the child in his arms, overcome by an indescribable emotion. A disturbance? The young au pair observes the scene from afar and attributes a perverse desire to Vincent. She confides in the parents. Doubts and fear lead to a trial, then to a dismissal. Vincent moves to Rome.

Twenty-five years later, Raphaël has become a renowned painter, working around the motif of water and submersion. An exhibition brings the two men face to face again. For three days, although neither of them had ever been with men before, they make love. This is the story Vincent confided to his psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle, who made it a chapter in her book En cas d’amour.

On stage, the psychoanalyst and the judge who was in charge of the trial re-examine the facts and force us to confront our own judgments. The narrative thus leaves us facing unresolved, living questions, and dizzying uncertainties. Inhabited by partitions that are sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, acting as both boundaries, filters, and projection surfaces, the space makes the present and the past, the visible and the invisible, coexist. All these years later, what is Raphaël doing with Vincent: is he reclaiming his story? Is he freeing himself from it? A proponent of actor-driven theatre serving heroes and sentiments worthy of Greek mythology, Noëmie Ksicova takes us into a world where characters are captive to powerful passions that overwhelm them.