After 7 years away from the stage and 3 shows each crowned with the Molière award for the best one-man show, Valérie Lemercier, who has been swept up by cinema in recent years (Palais Royal, Orchestral Seating, Agathe Cléry the Musical by Etienne Chatiliez), is touring with a show that is once again astonishing, delirious, and always a proof of her audacity and immense talent.
Valérie Lemercier kicks off her one-woman show with a period chronicle. There, one encounters old France haunting the stands at Roland-Garros and the harsh France below, cruel to those whose lives are even more skew-whiff. It’s a performance where complicity hides a dryness of heart. To make her audience laugh, Valérie Lemercier chooses simplification. Visually first, dressed in black with a different red fabric for each sketch. Audibly next: she neither forces her tone nor her voice. The comedian borrows enough linguistic tics, droning or vehement accents to outline her characters, men or women of all ages. She doesn’t delve into caricature but adopts a mimicry that brings out the darkness of the words, the lack of compassion, the snobbery, the tyranny, the sexual perversity.
Only Lemercier can observe her contemporaries in such a way, not fearing excess, the raw, even the trash, but managing to depict an authentic humanity. Loneliness, sex obsession, pettiness, snobbery… Dressed in black, all it takes is a red fabric to portray the character, whether it’s the apron of a woman from Normandy, the comfort toy a little girl of a psychoanalyst nervously manipulates, or the scarf of a bourgeoisie.
After the opening number – a pregnant woman asks a young cellist to stand in for her to take care of rockers from Glasgow visiting Paris, listing all the escapades awaiting her – comes Jean-Claude from the South. He praises his country house like a seasoned tour guide and casually mentions the cordiality of swinging. Following him are the widower who, on the day of his wife’s funeral, obscenely recounts his marital life to his stepson; the abusive mother with a restricted life; the radical environmentalist, the bouncy little girl who listens to the confidences of her mother’s psychoanalyst patients: “They have big problems because nobody loves each other at the same time (…). A woman chokes so much she cries. She wanted children, she had them, she doesn’t want them anymore”; the unhappily married woman, who forgot her husband at the gas station on his birthday (“what a laugh!”), is bored stiff as soon as she gets home.
If you missed her last one-woman show 6 years ago and if you want to discover her humor and incredible ease on stage, do not hesitate: go laugh at Nikaia.
