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Le Mardi à Monoprix
Emmanuel Darley
Le Mardi à Monoprix
photo : JJ Kraemer
Actes du théâtre n° 53.[ imprimer ]
Marie-Pierre has been looking after her father every Tuesday for a while now. She spends the day with him, does his cleaning and ironing. They chat - about this and that. About today and yesterday. About before. About Chantal, her mother, who is no longer alive. About Jean-Pierre too. They chat and then they go out - on their usual walk. Straight down the street, past the town hall and down the path along the canal.
But above all on Tuesdays Marie-Pierre and her father go to the Monoprix supermarket to get what they need for the week. Enough to keep her father going until the following Tuesday. The two of them walk up and down the aisles; Marie-Pierre carries the groceries in a plastic Monoprix basket. They have their little rituals. Then they wait in line at the cash register. The people here know them. They stare at them. Especially at Marie-Pierre, who is beautiful. And tall. They only have eyes for her. All eyes are turned on her as she shops with her father on Tuesday mornings at Monoprix.
Before - but it was a while ago - Marie-Pierre’s name was Jean-Pierre.

Emotional Chaos

“Marie-Pierre cleans the house and plays the ‘domestic goddess’ for her virile father who can’t quite face the obvious. Marie-Pierre shops at a Monoprix supermarket, at a safe distance from her father, caught between pleasure and pain. Everyone - including the customers and cashiers in the store - stares at her. She’s independent when in town, but suffers from her father’s refusal to acknowledge “her.” How to express the happiness she feels when she’s with him? Darley’s succinct and finely crafted writing is a penetrating expression of Marie-Pierre’s moods as she rambles loosely down a luminous path of feelings and thoughts.[…] A vibrant denunciation of the refusal to accept those who are different and of macho behavior in general.”
Véronique Hotte, La Passerelle, October 2010



“As a child Jean-Pierre liked washing dishes and putting them away. He already felt ‘like a girl inside.’ As an adult he wears skirts and heels and calls himself Marie-Pierre, which his father has never accepted. Nonetheless, every Tuesday his daughter visits him ‘as is,’ cleans his house, does his laundry and goes with him to the supermarket. He persists - ‘relentlessly’ - in ignoring his offspring and in calling her Jean-Pierre. […] It’s beautiful, grave, powerful and as moving as a piece of music by Schumann.”
Nathalie Simon, Figaroscope, October 18, 2010

First staged and performed in 2007 by Jean-Marc Bourg at the Théâtre d'O in Montpellier.
Opened in 2009 in Paris (Théâtre Ouvert), staged by Michel Didym, starring Jean-Claude Dreyfus. (Nominated at the 2010 and 2011 Molières awards for best actor, best living French-language playwright and best company).
Opened in 2011 in Laval, staged and performed by Patrick Sueur, Théâtre Dû.
Opened at the Edinburgh Festival, staged by Simon Stokes, starring Simon Callow, August 2011.
Opened in Athens, staged by Katerina Berdeka, starring Faedon Castris, November 2011.

Published by Actes Sud-Papiers in France.
Published by Nick Hern Books in the U.K., translated by Sarah Vermande and Matthew Hurt.
Translated into German, Bulgarian, Greek and Portuguese.

Characters : 1 men -
Actes Sud-Papiers

She moves forward.
Staring at each other.
This goes on for some time.


Everybody stares at me on Tuesdays. Everybody.
Stares at me out the corner of their eye as if discreet but not at all actually.
Tuesdays are the days I spend there helping him out his cleaning and his washing. His ironing.
Him plonked in his armchair giving orders lifting his feet.
He says No effort the doctor said take it easy so there.
He says It's like that. I'm old. That's all.
He watches. He points. He keeps an eye on everything.
He says Where did you learn to Hoover?

He hardly says very much, though. He stays sat there quiet as midnight and I don't know what he's thinking.

I talk to myself. I ask questions that hang in the air dangling.

Tuesdays that’s that. I spend the day there doing this and that dusting and all sorts. I shake out the tablecloth I change the sheets. I empty the bin.
I give things a wipe. Give the place a good airing too.
I busy myself around him in front of him at his feet and he doesn't move he doesn't help me. I'm in his house as myself me as I am now and I wonder what’s he thinking.
I am like I always am I am dressed like this as I always am not going to put on an apron no I won't play chamber maid enough as it is.
He says Here comes the Domestic Goddess again he says that but it's no joke. It's got teeth. Regular he says it. It's his refrain you might say.
Him still sat in that dressing gown you wouldn't believe how long he's had it he stares at me.
I could say to him Don't sit there watching me go and have a wash but I don't I ask how was your week?
On Tuesdays yes every week without fail I am there I go there that’s how I’ve arranged it.

excerpt from Tuesdays at Tesco's, translated by Sarah Vermande and Matthew Hurt