VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival

Quai Ouest

Rachid Zanouda

08/10/2010 ,  23:00
09/10/2010 ,  18:00
10/10/2010 ,  16:00
11/10/2010 ,  18:00

Dramaturgy: Bernard-Marie Koltès
Direction: Rachid Zanouda
Set design: Rachid Zanouda - Fabrice Le Fur
Light design: Jean-Jacques Beaudouin
Original music: Mikael Plunian
Video: Anne Favre e Erwan Marion
Assistant to the direction: François Tizon
Costume design: Annabelle Simon

With: Marc Bertin, Stephen Butel, Anne de Queiroz, Marie Favre, Vincent Guédon, Arnaud Saury, Marie Payen , Jean Sukama-Bamba

Produced by: Théâtre National de Bretagne di Rennes, Culture Program of the European Union inside the Prospero Project
Co produced by: Cie Humanus Gruppo con il sostegno di l’Aire Libre/Saint-Jacques de la Lande
With the support of: Service Culturel de L’Ambassade de France en Italie -. Délégation Culturelle/Alliance Française de Bologne

Performed in french with italian subtitles

Running time: 2h

NATIONAL PREMIÈRE

The escape of Maurice Koch, a business man turned embezzler, comes to a halt in a warehouse taken over by illegal immigrants in the Quay West where Charles and his family also dwell. The chance encounter between Maurice and Charles sets off a chain of misfortunes. Charles dreams about escaping his miserable life and leaving his family behind as well. Maurice simply happens to get stuck in the same cutting edge. The collision of two different worlds throws both men off balance. The two men are bound together sometimes by greed, sometimes by trust. Both are imprisoned in their own realities.

Koltès died young, but his timeless text is as valid now as ever. “Light and shadows dance on the stage under Rachid Zanouda’s direction; the atmosphere reverberates with the incisive sound of the violin. Friendship is loyal, beautiful and bitter.” (Ouest France 26.3.2010)

There is a sense of true tragedy in Quai Ouest. This has to come out in the performance and in the way it is directed. To release the play from social chains, I think it is very important to take in consideration both the destinies of the characters and the poetic development. This way the play doesn’t become too simplified or banal. Like plays made in the era of Greek Tragedies, Quai Ouest has to participate in making the society better.

Bernard-Marie Koltès makes two people, who have nothing in common but an undefined goal, meet each other outside everything, in a state of nothingness. This common goal they have soon becomes the core of the play. The actor playing Charles becomes the leader of the play – every move, every choice, every action that Charles makes has a physical effect on all the people and the play itself.

The space on the stage, where the action takes place, could not be made logical. When the play proceeds, the warehouse becomes increasingly chaotic. This makes the space rambling. The development of the characters and the play itself shake the space, it becomes disunited. This place starts to resemble a labyrinth more and more as the play goes on, and the characters must develop: the space is familiar, but they don’t recognize it based on what happens there – or doesn’t happen. The place becomes a cruel world, where everything has to be remade, where each individual becomes a stranger to the others.

Theatre is an instrument through which Koltès speaks about the present day in the form of a fictional story. The characters refer to political questions through poetic, simple and direct language and accordant with Greek theatre, even Shakespearean theatre and classical culture.

Through the language that the characters use, Bernard-Marie Koltès mediates the political dynamics of the play. The chaos reflects social violence.

www.t-n-b.fr
www.prospero-online.eu

Rachid Zanouda

RACHID ZANOUDA has graduated from the school of Théâtre National de Bretagne. This is the third play by Bernard-Marie Koltès that he directs. The earliear ones, La Nuit juste avant les Forêts (The Night Just Before the Forests) and Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton (In the Solitude of Cotton Fields), were performed at Binari Binari -festival in San Vito al Tagliamento, Northern Italy, in 2001. This spring Quai Ouest was being performed in Théâtre National de Bretagne, Rennes. The play will also be performed in Modena in October 2010

The show

Programme