“Everything we know about war has been told by men”: in Saint-Denis, nine former Soviet combatants tell their war in the Nobel Prize for Bélarusse Svetlana Literature Alexievitch, adapted by director Julie Deliquet.
These women, the ancient Brancardières, pilot or even the elite drug, remember that day in June 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, “the balance.” “That night, we went to dance,” rewinds one of them, sitting, like the others, in a kitchen, that the linen is dried on the roof. “We were five friends, I am the only one who has reviewed my mother,” said another. The work, adapted to the first book by Svetlana Alexievitch, echoes today’s conflicts, from Gaza to Ukraine.
Possibility of the calendar, the rehearsals of The war does not have a woman’s face It began on February 24. Three years, day by day, after the Russian invasion in Ukraine, previously in the USSR. The 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievitch, had recorded, in the 1970s, in his tape recorders, for a work published in 1985. A story, that of “this million committed women” during World War II, spent a long time in silence.
Before adapting this documentary novel, Julie Deliquet tells an AFP interview that has gone to Berlin, where Svetlana Alexievitch now lives. To the question: “Why there were no more testimonies about violations, about all the taboos of the great war”, the author, about twenty years at that time, replied: “It was not because women wanted to keep silent, it is because I did not dare to ask them.”
No taboo, not even violations, has overlooked this adaptation. “We no longer had our rules,” some could not have children after the war, an actress who plays an old Soviet pilot said on stage. “The show is built so that some things are deeply surprised,” assumes the director, also director of the Gérard Philipe Theater (TGP), National Dramatic Center of Saint-Denis (Sena-Saint-Denis) where the work is interpreted. “There were none, but we had discomfort, every night, women.”
We have built a political and social word
In this two and a half hours room, scheduled until October 17 in Saint-Denis before a tour since January, the word is the main character. “This is a show in which we build a political and social word, not an intimate word,” explains Julie Deliquet. The ten actresses, nine who embody the former fighters interviewed for which they play Svetlana Alexievitch, repeated with school students of Saint-Denis high school. For some, they have “sometimes fled other wars in their family stories,” says Julie Deliquet.
Putting into use to find out how they would question the former combatants, helped the construction of the show, says the forties. “How did you do for the rules in the front?”, “Was there a threat of sexual abuse?”, “Were there happy moments?” …
Another surprising moment of the work, the postwar period. “They experienced horror,” he analyzes Julie Deliquet, but when they returned to civil life, they clearly made them have to resume their place in society of the time: “be a good mother or wife.”
The mandates, in a way, always topical, lament Julie Deliquet: “Today, we are in a joint system, but we will ask ourselves when we are in the creation of how we do it with our children. We do not ask men.” And, he insists, some taboos during the war always permeate our daily life. “The rules are bother.”
This work also raises the question of the place of war in our societies. “While we have free access war toys, as long as we offer it as a gift, there is something that we have joined for the notion of war,” said Julie Deliquet.
Source: BFM TV
