LA NOTE D'EVENE :
http://www.evene.fr/agenda/fich.php?ide=3790

by Géraldine Violet, 5 March 2005


There are suspended chairs. They are broken. In pieces. Attached by a leg, or by their backs. That's it. They are the set, a visible and metaphoric background, capturing in and by themselves the upturned and gangrenous aesthetic that Poe's words unleash. These words, that the three actors let whistle, have a bitter taste. They weave the worrying shadow that hangs over the house of Usher. A brother and a sister, Roderick and Madeleine, are the last survivors of a long and incestuous line established and propagated in devastating consanguinity. The third character is the friend, he who visits, who comes all the way to this house overwhelmed by shadows, a house of silence, fear, cries, grimaces, abbreviated whispers. A madness permeates and overcomes everything, rolling over the faces, deforming all postures, every look is disgusting. Especially Roderick's. We remain suspended, paralyzed, bewitched by such pale beauty. The thin set wonderfully amplifies the interpretation as a hallucination of the actors. Here, the dead mix with the living and vice versa. And we are left astray, here and there, in the footsteps of the friend, [du coryphée??], in the prompter's box, it makes no difference, his presence testifies to the break up of the house. Difficult in this tortuous maze, invisible and yet there, to leave unscathed by this stifling and breathtaking gothic tale.