After a long silent prologue evoking the creation of the world and then the fertilisation of an ovum by a “ballet of spermatozoids”, the Poète (Poet) brings into focus the birth of two characters – Homme (Man) and then Femme (Woman). They both feel the “tragic desire to be made complete”. They make love and are thus made whole. But disease, infidelity, weapons and secrets appear with the birth of the city. Homme and Femme forget one another. A new concrete city takes over the old one, and no space is left for emotions. Homme finds himself in a crowd led by money, proprietorship and the market. Why waste your life for machines, Homme asks? Why give birth to children in a world that is filled with pain, Femme asks as an echo? Determined “not to accept the unacceptable”, “not to allow to not live” and to “organise the dream”, they meet again before fading into the growing darkness.

Rod puppet

Adults

France

Metz

Printed

Love

Sexuality

Labour

Daily life

Industry

Pollution

Madness

Lyrical

Philosophical tale

Erotic

Gabriel Cousin, Oratorio pour une vie, L'Avant-scène théâtre, n° 702, 1982 (cover page)

French

Poet

Love duet

Scene of copulation

Hands visible

Monologue

Inserting poetry

Avista

Chorus

Oratorio pour une vie

Oratorio for a life

While the Father of a rich, bourgeois family is dying at the hospital, his house is being burgled. Pascaline, his help (who has become his wife since he became a widower) laments, but her daughter Sarah is delighted to be relieved of the burden of the memories attached to the objects. A Young Man (the Father’s son) happens to come back that very day after seven years of unexplained absence. Freddy, a young and attractive rogue, arrives the same day to ask his mother Pascaline to give him an explanation for the identity of his father and for the reasons that have led her to abandon him. Pascaline, who behaves like a mother towards the Young Man, rejects Freddy. We learn that she survived the Shoah when she was a child. She pretends to ignore who Freddy’s real father is and she also claims that, after denying her pregnancy, she entrusted her to her sister, who raised him without love in a poor suburb. An alcoholic and a very unstable person, she sees Nazis coming out of the walls, unless that it is Freddy who is manipulating her so that she tells him the truth. Later, Pascaline, drunk, confesses to Freddy we was born out of a short-lived relationship she had with a Maghrebin jazz musician who died during the Algerian War. She ends up accepting his son as a gift from God. Freddy’s attractiveness and the ambiguity of his behaviour reveal both the Young Man’s homosexual desire and Sarah’s need for love, as she was a prisoner of an unconditional love for her own brother, and therefore rejected any kind of sexual intimacy. The Young Man encourages his sister to find happiness with Freddy while he, knowing that she is happy, will be able to transition into the woman he realized he wants to be. The phone rings and the death of the Father is announced. Pascaline goes off to discover the world, encouraging Freddy and Sarah to build a fulfilling life as a couple in the house.