Double winner! The two plays by Harold Pinter that Ludovic Lagarde is directing today at the Théâtre de l’Atelier form a sensational diptych. Both evoking couple relationships, L’Amant and La Collection respond to each other in a singular way. The English playwright wrote them in the space of two years, at the beginning of the 1960s. They belong to a cycle that their author designated as “comedies of menace”, because they have a Hitchcockian atmosphere. Creaking at will, the texts cheerfully make fun of conventions. Let us judge… In L’Amant, a woman has an extramarital affair. Her husband knows about it and makes sure he never comes home too soon. Until a grain of sand slipped into his diary.
In La Collection, two households see their daily life explode the day when the virus of jealousy interferes in one of them. Terrifyingly cruel, yet irresistibly funny, these writing gems reveal Pinter’s talent for boxing absurd dialogue. We can guess the influence of his friend Beckett. But it is above all for their excellent distribution that you have to go and see these pieces. And if possible the two in a row, because between them there are wonderful games of echoes. Valérie Dashwood and Laurent Poitrenaux are imperial from start to finish. As for Mathieu Amalric and Micha Lescot, the perversity they manage to instill in their characters is simply diabolical.
L’Amant and La Collection, at the Théâtre de l’Atelier, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., until June 25.
“Wow! ” indoors.
On the way to the 16th edition of the Vannes Book Fair, of which Le Point is a partner, chaired this year by Didier van Cauwelaert, surrounded by the godmother, Irène Frain, and the godfather Yann Queffélec. Livr’à Vannes (Levr’e Gwened, in Breton) has a taste for the open sea and invites the Icelandic Eva Björg Ægisdottir and the American Craig Johnson to the thriller side. It also greets Georges Simenon on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of his birth and offers a gastronomic focus with Sophie Dudemaine and her famous cakes. Politics is not to be outdone: Roselyne Bachelot will be the subject of a round table during which she will go behind the scenes of this universe she knows so well (June 10, 2 p.m.). Some 200 authors are invited to the port of Vannes, including Philippe Besson and Xavier de Moulins for a dialogue moderated by Élise Lépine, from the editorial staff of Le Point, on the theme “Confronting your ghosts and your bereavement” (June 11 at 10 a.m. ). Impossible to escape the ritual dictated for dummies which will be about Colette (June 11 at 10:45 a.m.). Also noteworthy is the tribute paid to Jean Teulé (June 11 at 11:45 a.m.), who was honorary president in 2019.
From June 9 to 11, port of Vannes
In 2004, a batch of 340 photos resurfaced at a New York flea market. These old amateur photos taken between 1950 and 1960 show men dressed as women. Not cabaret divas, but American women of the time, middle-class housewives, who gardened or played Scrabble. Welcome to Casa Susanna, a wooden house, lost at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, a few hours from New York. It was here that, in the midst of McCarthyism, in the reactionary America of the Hays Code where all deviant behavior was hunted down, Susanna (real name Tito Arriagada) and his wife, Marie, famous wigmaker of the 5th Avenue, housed it all. first clandestine network of transvestites. Shows, hairstyles, make-up and high heels, everything was allowed at Casa Susanna. A great collector of photos of transvestites, the director Sébastien Lifshitz, helped by the historian of photography Isabelle Bonnet, brings us back, through this fabulous documentary, to this extraordinary refuge where transidentity began to be invented.
Casa Susanna, on Arte, June 14 at 8:55 p.m.; exhibition at the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, from July 3 to September 24.
“Clandestine Pollens” exhibition at the Chambord estate, until September 17.