Colette on stage, as if she were living again

It begins in a rather comical way, so to speak. It is Saturday August 7, 1954, the day of the national funeral of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette, who died on the 3rd in her apartment at the Palais-Royal. Excerpts from the event are projected onto a curtain. We hear the voice of a journalist, this voice so particular, so dated from another era. A voice in black and white. Is it Pierre Dumayet’s?

Behind the veil, a young woman surrounded by a sort of white caftan. It's Colette - played by Cléo Sénia, who really has all the talents (she writes, plays, sings, dances). The novelist comments on her own funeral and when the rain of tributes falls on her coffin, she prefers to have fun with it. Colette, national glory? “I’m Burgundian!”, she meows. The medal of grand officer of the Legion of Honor placed on the catafalque? “How ugly she is!” Those hundreds of funeral wreaths? “Flowers are made for the living, not the dead!” President of the Goncourt Academy? “I never got that price!” When the veil slides, we see the woman appear who is not yet Colette but Sidonie Gabrielle, daughter of Jules Colette and Adèle Eugénie Sidonie. Sidonie-Gabrielle, boyish cut, immediately makes us think of the famous Claudine at school.

Cléo Sénia is now in a black skirt and blouse, and she will, blending gracefully into Colette's skin, tell us about the life of "the great scandalous one": her childhood in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where the little girl from the earth with “long, too-tight braids that whistled (...) like the strands of a whip”; his arrival in Paris and his meeting with Willy, a writer who never wrote a single work, a “designer of pages and format”, but who will, almost in spite of himself, bring glory to the woman who became his wife; his taste for theater, pantomime, his scandals...

The show is admirably directed by Léna Bréban. We had to think about it, about this Sidonie-Gabrielle/Colette split. The first, in a Claudine collar, will appear throughout the play on small screens, multiplying the comments on Colette's life, a life of unseemly freedom led to the ground. The text by Cléo Sénia and Alexandre Zambeaux - dotted with wonderful quotes - addresses all the themes dear to the author of Le Blé en herbe: nature, the feminine condition, motherhood, bisexual loves, the three marriages, literature she said – figure of speech! - not to like, and of course the music hall, the common thread of this representation. It is also in this discipline that the sensual Cléo Sénia reveals herself. She has attractive stripping and refined eroticism. “At home, everything is physical,” said Colette. Like her character, Cléo Sénia assumes her freedom of body and mind, and the public - with whom she never stops playing - cannot remain indifferent to the numbers, or rather the paintings, of her "musicolette".

Until March 30, 2024, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. at the Théâtre Tristan-Bernard, Paris (8th)