Jeunesse
Jeunesse
The Nightmare of Mephisto by Les Barbares
ENGLISH TRADUCTION
It has now been four and a half years since Jérémie Lebreton, the director of this troupe, started working on this text, and once again, it's another adaptation of Klaus Mann's Mephisto that we're talking about here. Originally, this production was a graduation project performed in September 2021 at La Manufacture, Switzerland's University of Performing Arts. It was performed four times without being revived. The director has now revisited his work for this new cycle of ten performances.
When it comes to young theater, it often means: collective adventure, unforeseen obstacles, necessary courage, economic constraints, joyful determination, and other inevitable twists and turns. In this case, an actress had to be replaced by an actor, the set designer is no longer the same, nor are the lighting designer and the costume designer. For the first revival of this production, the troupe was still fine-tuning the sound arrangements just fifteen minutes before the audience entered...
Thus, we were presented with a breathless young theater production, full of inventiveness, scenographic noise, and physical commitment, against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism. A powerful cocktail, but one that was not to everyone’s taste in the audience that night. After all, isn’t it said that hell is paved with good intentions? It certainly takes a certain courage to stage Mephisto.
Nevertheless, this first night of the revival received warm applause from the majority of the audience. No doubt because, from the very beginning of the performance, these artists shared with us their deep desire to act, to connect with us through imagination and fiction, to revel, to joke, to enjoy, and to make us travel both through theater and history.
It is a creation with an aesthetic that resembles a theater studio. An unfinished space freely modulated by the performers using evocative elements: flight cases, chandeliers, marshmallow lobsters, a red curtain treated like a tattered rag, an artist's dressing room evoked in chiaroscuro, and theater fog...
However, this is not a theater of deconstruction but rather experimental theater, where many forms are explored: the abolition of the stage/audience divide by keeping the lighting unified, a luminous shower restoring theatrical play in a captivating form, cold sequences alternating with frenzied ones supported by neon lights or even a strobe light.
It is also a physical theater, where pleasures, excesses, quarrels, desires, eroticism, theoretical conflicts about theater, and political conflicts about the role of theater in the face of Nazism are embodied. As these characters descend into chaos, the verbal conflicts become incredibly violent, and the theater door is slammed in anger. At various moments, the performance doesn’t hesitate to lean into political ranting: grabbing a microphone and letting everything out.
It is also a very musical production, supported at times by a sound design, at other times giving way to piano and singing, but also to rock drumming and electronic music sequences: a show alternating between the poetry of theater and the hell of political crisis.
In this storm caused by the rise of Nazism, a red curtain eventually rises at the back of the stage. Like a distant horizon, its crimson color has far more to do with the blood of Nazism's victims than the golden trappings of Italian-style theater. It alternately takes on the appearance of a relic or a mantle.
After the performance, I wanted to speak with Jérémie Lebreton, the director, about his choice of this text: "I really wanted to explore this idea of a pact with the devil: how far can one go for ambition or dreams? We are all confronted with the question of compromise, the question of Mephisto—working for a system that goes against the ideals we claim to have but that we accept for a form of recognition. We all face this to some extent, whether in theater or elsewhere. It's always a question of balance between our beliefs and the system we are involved in: what are we willing to accept? This play pushes the limits to the extreme, using the Nazi regime as an embodiment of the devil on Earth."
Finally, it’s important to acknowledge the work of the young artists and technicians in this troupe, who deserve to be mentioned individually, and whose names can be found here.
The post-show discussion with the Les Barbares troupe will take place on Tuesday, June 6. Let’s wish the best of luck to this production, running until June 14, as well as to all of the Départs d’Incendies events, which continue until July 2. To those of you reading this: dare to support young theater, and go discover them!
Joël Cramesnil
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