SACD - Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques
Entr'Actes
home
playwright database
News from Abroad
Translation Database
Playwrights Corner
In the Spotlight
New Plays in Print
Actes du théâtre Archives
 
 
Actes du théâtre :
newsletter
 
Site Map
 
[ français ]
 
 

Playwright database

 
     
Et Dieu pour tous
Tilly
Actes du théâtre n° 51.[ imprimer ]
Three characters - a woman, a man and a younger man.
The three of them size each another up, clash, judge, lie to, discover, hate and love one other. After the night is over their lives may take a turn for the good or bad, and change for better or worse. God only knows.

“A sarcastic comedy that doesn’t hold back. The text is mainly about guilt. Human beings may be the victims of betrayal, rape and incest, but they still feel guilty. The guilt is inherent to the Judeo-Christian ethos. That’s undoubtedly why the playwright is so sarcastic about religion and tries to get even with its wretched churchiness.”
Entr’Actes Reading Committee


Et Dieu pour tous ! (And God For Us All!)

“It’s so like the state of the world today.
That’s the real slap in the face when you read this play.
You’re right in the thick of it, the planet today, its interconnections and mafias, its cannibalistic brutality. The play is directly plugged into the anxiety of our times, revealing a nagging litany of its obsessions and violence.

As the title suggests, religion is at the heart of the play, just as it has become the focus of nearly everything at the beginning of the third millennium (as predicted by Malraux), but with so many dark threats and age-old scandals to get rid of! As if exhumed from some stinking excavation, these open secrets finally bring the scope of the crimes into broad daylight. Sexual violence carried out with impunity under the cover of religion and family (incest, the plight of women, pedophilia) for centuries.

Religion, sex and money are the ‘trinity’ hovering over the play.
Dirty money and the elite of society, high-level whoring, sex as a weapon of power, rape as a weapon of war, Iran and its dark world hostile to women and their freedoms, the colossal wealth of the rich in poor countries, widespread wars on the poor, turned into outcasts.

Three characters verging on the emblematic.
The homeless man rejected by society, cast out on the streets, with no hope for the future.
The ex-high-class whore with the look of a richly recycled adventuress, a kind of star in her own way, and as it happens a nihilist who knows she’s totally depraved.
The bastard son, born in sin, who works in the luxury world and kisses ass to the powerful, a lackey who spits on those who feel even more humiliated.

A weird night and weird encounters, in very cold weather…


The strength of Et Dieu pour tous is that these issues are dealt with in a preposterous and comic manner, like a twisted, trashy vaudeville balanced shakily on these constant off-kilter situations, pushing reality into the realm of the surrealistic. All the more so because the three characters alternately employ the art of lying with the confidence of professional killers.

You never really find out the inner workings of this labyrinth of undetectable lies and savage truths, of constant ambiguity and dangerous games. It could all be just a twisted scheme only permitted by the – highly unusual – circumstances. Permission to let it all out and say everything? Permission to fabulate, to reinvent your life, to string along total strangers without any defenses? Permission to transgress what?

It’s all packaged as a brilliantly stylish farce, in a subtle and ambiguous design that seems at times to double as a revue or cabaret (the wildly blasphemous number in which the woman does quite a monotheistic striptease). Later on, to further highlight this growing divergence, there’s the episode with the filmed interview where the camera acts as a weapon and sets a deadly trap, like in a soap opera. Finally there’s the grand melodramatic scene, the confession of incest the mother has committed with the son, a hopeless attempt to cancel through another crime the inexpiable one of giving birth to him.

The montage of clashing, contradictory narratives and the sharp, contrasting construction of this dark yet hilarious play - strikingly new in Tilly’s work - reveals what is hidden behind its convincingly realistic and remarkably sustained continuity: a blistering attack, an explosive montage, a response that mirrors (and gives a slap in the face to) the smug cynicism of these fine times.

The set goes beyond realism and is a radical metaphor in itself: down at the bottom are the sidewalk, the street, trash and social ejecta. Up at the top are the elite, or what passes for it. The apartment is empty, verging on the abstract, with closed blinds as if in a state of siege. And fortunes change as the elevator goes up and down.”
Michel Hermon




A public reading of the play will be held on July 28 & 29, 2011 at the Festival de NAVA in Limoux. Production in progress.
Staged by the playwright. Cast: Brigitte Catillon, Pierre Cassignard, Adrien Melin.

Characters : 1 women - 2 men -

A young man rushes out the back door and disappears down the stage-left corridor. The woman slides the top of her coat down her arms, revealing her bust. She’s wearing a superb red and black embroidered satin bustier. The man applauds. The young man slowly returns to the entrance holding a video camera and starts to film what’s going on through the glass door. The man serves himself another drink and settles down in his armchair while the woman continues undressing, slowly unbuttoning the last buttons on her coat.
WOMAN Come, my love, the more the merrier.
The young man enters and stays in the background filming. She moves slowly toward the camera humming “J’ai deux amours”
YOUNG MAN Can you explain what you’re doing here?
WOMAN I was showing this gentleman…
MAN Raoul.
WOMAN I was showing Raoul the different kinds of camouflage I used for safe travel when I was younger.
YOUNG MAN Before meeting my father?
WOMAN Before, during and after.
YOUNG MAN (still filming) Tell me about it.
WOMAN About what?
YOUNG MAN Your travels.
WOMAN It was always the same ritual. A limousine at my door, the airport, a private jet headed for Damascus, Dubai, Macao, Bermuda, or wherever. An evening and night spent in a palace or on a yacht, then back again - jet, limousine, home.
MAN And all under the table. Well done!
YOUNG MAN (camera in hand) Why do you drink?
MAN Why do you think?
YOUNG MAN You, shut up. I know nothing about you, Mom.
WOMAN There’s too much to tell.
YOUNG MAN I’ve got plenty of time.
MAN More, more, more.