It is a very rare talent to know how to lead the audience by the tip of the nose for an hour and a half of performance, and then return them at night to a state in which they are no longer themselves or have become someone else. When the alliance between a text and its staging works, this audience is no longer the owner of their thoughts. It becomes the toy of a plotted and silent manipulation, through the articulation of signs such as acting, music, sound effects, lights and scenery.
The Vegetarianshow presented by the Italian Daria Deflorian at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe is a consummate example of the power of metamorphosis and the capacity of persuasion of theatre. Entering the hall of the Ateliers Berthier without preconceived ideas, kidnapped by a poisonously charming performance, the spectator emerges united to a cause that he did not imagine would touch him so closely. This cause is what Yonghye, the heroine of The vegetarian (2007, The Feathered Serpent, 2015), a novel by Han Kang, a South Korean writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October.
Yonghye decided that he would no longer eat meat. Her husband discovers her in the middle of the night standing in the kitchen emptying the refrigerator. The meat goes in the trash, soon it will be joined by eggs and then milk. The vegetarian takes a big bite of the lettuce. The groom laments. Why? he asks. “I had a dream”she answers. Just four words and the door opens to the unknown.
Kafkaesque orbit
In three parts that cover three years of Yonghye’s life, the novel delves into a disturbing reality. First stage with the words of the heroine’s husband, second stage with her brother-in-law, third sequence with her sister, three characters whose normative anchoring is synonymous with brutality. The conjugal one, of a misogynistic husband who despises his wife; the sexual one, of a brother-in-law who subjects his sister-in-law to tendentious erotic games; the devastating one of a sister who has the vegetarian locked up in a psychiatric hospital to restore her to what she believes to be sanity.
If Han Kang’s pages were only about the choice of food hygiene, the comments would undoubtedly stop there. But the heroine says it again and again: “I had a dream. » And this text, which goes beyond the everyday to reach the rank of allegory, suddenly finds itself placed, by the work of Daria Deflorian, in a Kafkaesque orbit. The same strangeness, the same furtive retaliation exercised against those who separate. Yonghye’s future is neither animal nor human. It is a becoming-plant. She, who dreamed of blood spilled by man, claims to need only a little water and sun, and stands with her feet up and her head down. It is a tree whose foliage is found underground and not in the sky. He has decided his destiny and sticks to his resolution. Result: the world around her is disrupted and seen for what it is: banal but monstrous.
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