Samuel Beckett's first love: even better

“I have always written for a voice,” Beckett said. At Petit Saint-Martin, this voice is that of Dominique Maladie. The actress is directed or rather listened to by Alain Françon. On the set, a blue chair with a broken back, a suitcase and, lying on the blue floor - as if the body of a man had escaped from it - Charlot-style clothes: pants, a jacket, a pair of old shoes and a bowler hat. At the back of the stage, a stretched canvas on which a not completely round blackish circle is painted. It looks like a painting by Bram Van Velde. During the first minutes of the show, Dominique Valadié sits in the front row, with the audience.

A voiceover says a few lines from Company, one of Beckett's last texts: “ A voice comes to someone on their back in the dark. » Then the actress, dressed in a black jacket and pants, gets up. Then begins First Love, since it is this text published in 1946 that it concerns: “I went, not very long ago, to my father’s grave, that I know…” From there, Dominique Valadié will unfold the life of a wanderer who only wanders in his head. And in the skull of this curious man - abandoned by his family upon the death of his father - all kinds of thoughts linked to love collide.

Or rather the way to escape it. First Love is a true-false autobiographical story. Let's tell some funny news in the first person. From the meeting with Lulu on a bench to the final fall, this story of a love is a demolition of all conventions. Lulu is a prostitute with whom he refuses all contact. However, she tells him that she is pregnant, tells him that the baby is already jumping in her belly. The narrator, amorphous, responds: “If he jumps,” I said, “he’s not mine. » One day, he finds that his customers are making too much noise. So he leaves her.

Beckett is the greatest director of disarray, and we can count on him to stir up black humor. Here's a hairy sample: “Maybe I loved him platonically? I have difficulty believing it. Would I have traced her name on old cow shit if I had loved her with a pure, selfless love? And with my finger on top of that, which I then sucked? » Of Lulu, in the middle of undressing, he writes again: “She took off everything, with a slowness that would annoy an elephant, except the stockings, undoubtedly intended to heighten my excitement. » He adds, here is his genius: “It was then that I saw that she was cross-eyed. »

A woman playing a male Beckett character? Cheeky, right? The least we can say is that the Valadié transplant is working. The actress does not play the mijaure and the spectator, no longer having any illusions about humanity, happily lets his cerebellum be fiddled with. First love. At the Théâtre du Petit Saint-Martin, until December 31. Such. : 01 42 08 00 32.