I had prepared well. It’s not every day that we witness The Death of Danton. On leaving UGC Les Halles, after crossing the Palais-Royal, I bought the text of Georg Büchner’s play at the Comédie-Française bookstore. Because it was there that the play by this Swiss playwright was to be given for the first time, who died in 1837 at the age of 23, and until then best known for the other of his undisputed masterpieces. , Woyzeck. I learned to be wary of undisputed masterpieces.
I like to read plays before I see them. It’s a habit I picked up around the age of 30, when I started going to the Opera. I was tired of not understanding what the singers were singing; it must be said that I did not speak Italian and even less German, but even in Carmen, words escaped me. In fact, I was starting to get a little hard from the sheet. Things haven’t improved with age, and to tell you the truth, despite too many surgeries, today I’m pretty much deaf. My last thread of sociability, I owe it to two small amplifiers, furtively slipped into my ears.
I can still read. And Büchner’s play, after careful reading, disappointed me a lot. Stylistically, it is not worth a nail. We put that on the backs of the translators, they have nice backs. But from a dramaturgical point of view, it’s not terrible either. Knowing that he is going to die is not enough to give suspense. Even less to create characters. Not being able to create characters with Robespierre, Saint-Just, Desmoulins, Chaumette… with all the respect that I don’t like to owe to the dead (they piss me off), I would say that the young, too young Büchner, still had things to learn. But hey, Dora had said we were going, booked our evening, and deep down, I was interested to see how Simon Delétang, the director, was going to get out of such a heavy, academic text, without Depardieu, and after so many Mnouchkines.
We were super well placed, in the middle of the twelfth row of the orchestra. But when I saw the three basketball players sitting right in front of us, I understood that there were even better places and that we wouldn’t see anything. Misfortune never comes alone, I realized with amazement that I had forgotten my amplifiers in the pocket of my coat left in the cloakroom. I didn’t feel like getting the whole row up, and again on the way back, especially as the performance was about to begin. So, I made up my mind, I wasn’t going to hear anything, but since I knew the text, I was going to be able to concentrate on the staging. The problem is that to judge the staging, I had to lean to the right, to the left to see Danton. The lady who was behind me didn’t appreciate that: “Stop moving!” She said to me, unfriendly.
The play lasts two and a half hours, without intermission. At a certain moment, Robespierre climbs onto the table and, to claim Danton’s head, makes ridiculous gestures (Büchner and Delétang do not like Robespierre, you can tell). At another moment, another revolutionary rises in his turn on the table to defend or to attack Danton. It’s a time when we got on the table a lot, I explained to Dora. The kind of perfidy that relieves, in the middle of a painful evening.
Three days later, Dora and I climbed the few steps of an old building on rue des Prêcheurs to attend the tea ceremony performed by master Yuki Kani. Here too, we were well prepared. Stripped of all perfume, jewelry and prejudice, we entered this 20 square meter temple, like elves in a bubble called Japan.
Through the flavor of silence, the precision of elegance, the dull sound of wood, the whipping of matcha, at the end of this rite, we have achieved something.
