“Nothing opposes the night”: Elsa Lepoivre in the black light

We thought he was untouchable… Everything was opposed to “Nothing opposing the night” being represented on a theater stage. Delphine de Vigan’s novel has too much to do with the intimate, the depths of its author’s soul, the open wounds of a living family… Its writing and its publication (in 2011) are a mystery and a miracle.

Any incarnation risked ringing false and destroying the fragile balance of the work by opening a destructive pandora’s box. But Elsa Lepoivre, member of the Comédie-Française, was able to find the words. Convince the writer that she would know how, alone on the small stage of the Studio du Carrousel du Louvre, to express all the tenderness of a daughter for her mother broken by fate. Wake ghosts without betraying them or rushing them.

The program shows us a photo of the actress and the novelist, smiling, accomplices, like two sisters working side by side on the adaptation of the novel: fragments which evoke in ardent dotted lines the life of Lucille, the bipolar mother who is committed suicide, and the delicate work of investigation carried out by the writer with her relatives to give birth to the book.

text love

Elsa Lepoivre is a great tragedian and the family history of Delphine de Vigan is a tragedy: child deaths, accusation of incest and rape… Yet the actress is careful not to fall into a stuffy lyricism or an excess of dramatization . It is by bearing witness to his “love of text” that she convinced the novelist to allow her to take it. And this love, she expresses it through a thousand nuances and precautions.

A few laughs, a few stifled tears, a simple and natural diction, a confusing clarity even to express the unspeakable… The actress endorses the quote from the painter Pierre Soulages which is in the background before the start of the show: “My instrument was no longer black, but this secret light coming from black”.

Light is precisely at the center of Fabien Gorgeart’s work. The director who so beautifully orchestrated “Stallone” – the theatrical UFO carried by Clotilde Hesme – uses the spotlights like a brush. Evolving around a conference table, confidences, Elsa Lepoivre radiates in her subtle beams, changing according to her story. We can retain the pain, without forgetting the few bursts of joy in this ode to the deceased mother.

Nothing depressing in this show on the wire. A concentrate of pure emotion served by an extraordinary actress who knew how to penetrate the heart and soul of Delphine de Vigan. And to prove that the theater when it is beautiful and true, can, like literature, oppose the night.