From a small political theater to an authentic Parisian stage. A colorful character, an actor almost without knowing it, Jean Lassalle mixes memories of Béarna elected officials and personal anecdotes in a show whose relevance is never far away.
To form a government that lasts “more than 36 hours (…) it will be necessary to give peace to the dead before instilling it in the living!”, he launches with a cryptic formula that would be enough to make the new Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, think.
The former presidential candidate (in 2017 and 2022) and former MoDem deputy for the Pyrénées-Atlantiques for twenty years offered the premiere of his individual show on Thursday, October 9. Jean in the room – My anecdotes of a life.before 500 spectators at the Eiffel Tower theater, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
“Going on stage is a bit the same as giving very serious, very refined political speeches in the assembly, although mine were always improvised, where you try to relax the deputies, take them with you, in your dreams or in your memories,” he explains on BFMTV.
However, the man does not like rehearsals without an audience, which he considers “too difficult.” “I need to train while I do it,” he explains. “It’s like rugby, I had a better time when it was live.”
Privacy
For more than an hour, the tall man with brushed hair and “R’s” that roll like stones, then reveals, in a white shirt and red tie, another side of himself. “I hope to show at the core what remains of this man,” he told AFP.
Her birth: “Mom, it took her nine days to give birth to me!” – his desire to be mayor, at the age of 6, of Lourdios-Ichère, his town between Béarn and the Basque Country (he will be elected at the age of 21). Or the day he had to get his driving license back: to do so, in 2015, he explained to the Assembly that he had to validate “psychotechnical tests” three times in front of a hilarious Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy.
“I need to calm my blood pressure,” Jean Lassalle smiles from the first minutes, in front of an audience that is very fond of his anecdotes. Like Philippe Noël, 57 years old, gardener in Seine-et-Marne, wearing a blue T-shirt that says “Jean Lassalle, president.” “Secretly, it would be a wish,” he confided to AFP.
Because the viewers are also its former voters. But “taking into account what he has said about his health problems” – four heart operations suffered in 2022 – Philippe Noël says he has “a big doubt” about the return of this “truculent character that we are missing at the moment.”
Jean Lassalle, a former close friend of Matignon’s previous tenant François Bayrou, is best known for having led a 39-day hunger strike in 2006 in the Four Column Hall of the National Assembly to protest against the relocation of a factory to his native Aspe valley.
“It’s time to imagine everything”
“I don’t prohibit anything (…), I have time to imagine everything,” continues Jean Lassalle. For now, after spending much of his life “defending the widow and the orphan”, directing Lourdios-Ichère for more than forty years and suffering two defeats in the legislative elections (in 2022 and 2024), this son of a pastor and father of four children only aspires at the age of 70 to give his best, according to his co-producers Philippe Barreau and Magda Hadnagy.
“Jean, he could be your grandfather, your father, your uncle. You immediately feel good with him. And for me, what I really like is the human side of this gentleman,” Philippe Barreau confesses to AFP about the reasons that led him to convince Jean Lassalle to do it alone on stage. A bit like the former Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, before him.
“When we met, I told him ‘you’re not a clown, you’re a comedian, you’re here to tell your anecdotes,'” and “we let the beast go,” adds Magda Hadnagy, who built the one-man show “around” Jean Lassalle, based on the sound effects, the lighting, the chronology of the anecdotes, “so that everything makes sense.”
And in the eyes of Liza, a 21-year-old viewer, it works. Although “sometimes he was wrong” in his narration, “that is what makes the show charming,” judges this student of information and communication courses in Paris, originally from Clisson (Nantes). “He really sold it in a ‘like we were all drinking together’ way and I wanted to live that moment,” he concludes.
Jean Lassalle will offer 12 performances in Paris, before a tour throughout France in 2026.
Source: BFM TV
