The public is warned: Scali Delpeyrar’s replies are “to the word” those held by François Hollande when he was still at the Élysée. Charles Templon adapted the resounding book of confidences by Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme A president should not say that… at the Free Theater. And, if Scali Delpeyrar interprets a president without ever naming him, the spectators have no trouble rediscovering François Hollande there. The establishment also assures that “any resemblance to reality may not be coincidental”.
The play features this president facing two journalists – an experienced investigator and a long-toothed beginner – who regularly come to interview him and talk about the news. They go together from very light topics, such as football news, to more serious topics, starting with the attacks that marked Holland’s five-year term. So many conversations taken from the eponymous book by the piece and real exchanges between the former president and the journalists of Le Monde.
Our colleagues from 20 Minutes, who attended a performance, ensure that the show is “very realistic” and “paints a François Hollande who has become a fictional character sometimes comic, sometimes tragic”. “On stage, the true-false Hollande repeatedly makes people laugh. And often at his expense,” they note. On the ticket offices, the opinions are also laudatory for the play. The spectators salute both the staging and the acting. As for the dialogues, they still seem confusing.
