JustFocus offers you its review of " Closed due to war" by Marianne Oestreicher-Jourdain and Sophie Belissent.
History with its big axe
On the text by Marianne Oestreicher-Jourdain, contemporary playwright with a rare pen, the director Sophie Belissent (assisted by Sonadie Sen) has done an incredible job, knowing how to give this text all the contemporaneity and universality of the author's purpose.
The great strength of this play is to present us with characters who are terribly real because they are rich in complexities. The action is not located in a specific time and place, we only follow crossed trajectories within a makeshift hospital, in a country in tatters, and this is what makes this text a punchy text. Affirming a common destiny of humanity.
The other: this immemorial enemy
Everyone mingles by force of circumstances in this hospital, the refugee from a distant land, the wounded patriots of the army of this country, a woman who has lost her love, a woman who seeks to keep hope alive by keeping the memory of the wishes of the living, a man who buries the dead and tries to keep alive the memory and the name.
This man, he saved a pregnant woman. She doesn't speak. For a long time, the spectator and the other patients of the hospital, where only morphine is treated, will wonder why. The identity of this unknown woman named Lena is crucial. Men see in her the stranger, the enemy. And hatred and fear of creeping in and doing their sneaky work.
From women who are saved to women who save
This Lena who does not seem to want to live any more than she seems to want to give life is the guardian of the mythological gravedigger souls who saved her, it is he who fights to hang on to life when he learns her secret. He becomes the ally of the older woman who runs this hospital, the figure of the mother who makes the world go round, she collects under his wing without judgment and with kindness and love. Among these women who make the world go round, there is also this melancholic refugee who hid the only weapon.
But the small story catches up with the big one and the young mother relieves herself of too heavy a burden by a heavy gesture that sees the cycle of violence and revenge start again.
Where does hope still lie then? The hero gone is still a woman who by an act without return will definitively draw a line on the past, symbolically opening on a new future, where all possibilities can be reborn
Editor's opinion:
A moving and masterful piece at once punch and breath of humanity, necessary and so current, echoing the name of the company Le Temps présent that staged it. The actors are breathtaking, their mastery and their investment and generosity are absolute. Hats off. (Be careful, not for the youngest. 12+ years )
