If Nicole Garcia has often come to Montreal to defend her films, this is the first time we will see her here at the theatre. The actress will be on the boards of the TNM in Royan, the French teacher, a solo show created at the Avignon Festival in 2021.
At the end of the telephone, in Paris, Nicole Garcia answers the journalist in her deep, slightly hoarse and seductive voice. She hesitates, searches for the right word, seems to be sorting through her acting memory. Sixty years of career in the theater and on the screens, dozens of roles under the direction of the biggest names in French cinema, a dozen films behind the camera as a director.
All that was missing was a solo show on this beautiful course. Royan is her first “alone-on-stage”, under the direction of her son, the director Frédéric Bélier-Garcia (she has another son, Pierre Rochefort, singer and actor, whom she had with the actor Jean Rochefort). “It’s the loneliness of my character, Gabriella, that compels a monologue. This teacher is haunted by her ghosts. She addresses us as in a police interrogation, a police custody, before confessing. We feel her fragility, a guilt that she cannot name, because she lives her life under a breastplate. »
If Nicole Garcia goes back and forth between cinema and theater, her heart leans for the boards: “The theater is the source, she says. When I was younger, I thought I would only do theatre; the cinema arrived quite late in my career. On stage, I have the feeling of being at home, at home. It’s like going back to something close to childhood. »
Royan, the French teacher was written especially for Nicole Garcia. Marie NDiaye’s play highlights issues that are shaking the school environment, including harassment and bullying.
This French teacher, Gabriella, lives alone in Royan, a town on the Atlantic coast, near La Rochelle. She witnessed a tragedy with a student from her high school. The parents of the teenager go to her home to question her. But Gabriella refuses to see them. The teacher is afraid of giving in to madness, of digging up her ghosts from the past by talking to them…
In Royan, we find the themes dear to Marie NDiaye: guilt, absence, pretense, propriety. “It’s a heartbreaking story,” Garcia said. At the performance, the text takes on its full meaning. Marie NDiaye has a notion of tragedy in life. It is far from the psychological [theater]. »
La Presse interviewed Nicole Garcia two weeks ago, just after actress Adèle Haenel came out on the “violence of the French cinema milieu”. And in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, plunged into a controversy over the presence of Johnny Depp at the opening ceremony, star of Maïwenn’s feature film, Jeanne du Barry. Decision that led to the publication of an open letter signed by 123 actresses and actors in the newspaper Liberation, to express “their indignation” at “a system that supports the aggressors”.
What does the filmmaker think? In his opinion, sometimes it goes too far. “If the movement