Parler Pointu - Tournée

Benjamin Tholozan takes us into the heart of his southern roots. With humour and tenderness, he explores the question of accent, language and identity, caught between family inheritance and the desire for the stage. A show for everyone who, at some point, has searched for their place between two worlds. Benjamin Tholozan grew up in a village in the south of France. A Provençal land, Latin, violent, raucous. A land of bullfighting. The vulgar and the sacred are constantly intermingled there. His whole family still lives there, and they all speak with a southern accent. All except him. It is impossible to detect the slightest southern intonation in his speech, or the slightest word inherited from the Romance patois of his ancestors. To become an actor, he got rid of his accent. He now speaks "pointu", as people in the South call the Parisian accent, that of standard French spoken in the media and on theatre stages. Parler Pointu recounts the gradual abandonment of regional languages and accents, and what this loss holds at once of the intimate and the political. In this historical and family epic, Benjamin Tholozan embodies, with ardour, joy and precision, a whole gallery of characters who made French, and more particularly the Touraine accent, the only way of speaking still considered legitimate today.

Writing and performance: Benjamin Tholozan / Writing and direction: Hélène François / With Benjamin Tholozan and Brice Ormain, alternating with Guillaume L'église / Music creation: Brice Ormain / Lighting creation: Claire Gondrexon / Set design: Aurélie Lemaignen

The press on the show: Benjamin Tholozan, through Parler Pointu, his own story, denounces the silence imposed on regional speech, notably Occitan. It is very serious and very funny at the same time. L'Humanité

Accompanied by the music of Brice Ormain, whose chords readily carry us to the shores of the Mediterranean, the actor propels us back into the past, to the origins of French.