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Mathilde
Véronique Olmi
Actes du théâtre n° 13.[ imprimer ]
One evening Mathilde, a forty-year-old writer, comes home after being away for three months. The flat is full of boxes. While his wife was gone, Pierre was putting things away and sorting them out, because everything was disorderly and confused inside him. Mathilde has come home from prison. She was serving a sentence for corruption of a minor - an affair with a young boy she met at a writing workshop, the kind of affair that takes on the importance given to it by other people: the civil law of a moralistic society and the pain felt by a cheated husband.
What is left of this taboo relationship? Where does a writer really live? In what reality? What nourishes love in a couple? What nourishes writing? To whom and to what do we belong?
That night will involve a confrontation between Mathilde and Pierre. The questions have been asked… solitude and suffering are also a reflection of love.

"The tension in this play is that of desire - between a man and woman who have reached a mature age, who have already spent a number of years together and love one another. Mathilde doesn't criticise the woman who was caught up in the desire of a young fourteen-year-old and paid for it by doing three months in prison, nor does she show the confrontation between a couple about to break up. Rather, she paints a portrait of people who are searching and demanding the most from life. Véronique Olmi is an expert at putting desire at the heart of every relationship."
Claire David, publisher at Actes Sud-Papiers

Opened at the Benevento Festival (Italy), staged by Marco Carniti in September 2000.
Italian translation by Gioia Costa.

Characters : 1 women - 1 men -
Éditions Actes Sud-Papiers. - www.actes-sud.fr

MATHILDE: You've got quite a fertile imagination, don't you? You once told me - several times in fact - that it turned you on to think of me in someone else's arms.
PIERRE: It was a kind of… declaration of love.
MATHILDE: Just saying it was enough to turn you on.
PIERRE: It was a fantasy. I could have watched.
MATHILDE: And I wouldn't have been cheating on you if you were watching? Is that it? And what would I have had permission to do with that man. Huh? How far would you have allowed me to go? And since my desire is supposed to be based on your agreement, at what stage in the process would your trust stop?
PIERRE: OUR agreement! Which you betrayed! You went back on your word by going with that kid without my knowledge!
MATHILDE: And would you have given me your permission if I had asked? Liar! And since I felt better afterwards, perhaps the whole affair was good for the two of us and consequently he was the one being cheated on, but he didn't give a damn because he was free!
PIERRE: Indifferent, not free.
MATHILDE: Whereas you are particularly attached to me? And I'm reserved for you? Like a good table in a restaurant?
PIERRE: You were my wife.
MATHILDE: "My wife - Mathilde…" How many times did I hear that! May I introduce "my wife - Mathilde…!" Why did we have to go out every night?
PIERRE: It's known as having "a social life", and it didn't bother you at the time. You used to spend hours in the bathroom before going out.
MATHILDE: It was so important to you that I be sexy! Yes it took time - all that make-up, the jewellery, the short skirts and high heels. I was uncomfortable - like a workman dressing up in his Sunday best.
PIERRE: That's what you say now, but at the time you loved people thinking you were beautiful. You were coquettish about trying to get rid of your wrinkles and you asked advice from plastic surgeons' wives, which was a bit countrified of you…
MATHILDE: And which made you laugh?
PIERRE: No. It was touching and, strangely, juvenile.