Theater: Oh the beautiful days

Farce and tragedy at once!
Irish poet, writer, and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969) questions the meaning of the human condition in a dilapidated world in the aftermath of World War II. Breaking with the theatrical tradition of the time, he, along with a few contemporary playwrights—Ionesco, Pinget, Kantor, and others—invented the Theatre of the Absurd.

In 1963, Roger Blin directed the play "Oh les Beaux Jours" with Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault in two superbly invigorating, funny, cynical, and pathetic roles!

Since 2023, this latter title has been revived by Béatrice Hazard (Winnie) and Jean-Claude Robissout (Willy), directed by Guy Lenoir and lit by Jacques Franceschini, with special effects by Vincent Franceschini.

Rarely performed on our stages, the work forces actors and directors to fully respect the author's instructions and stage directions, something that creators more inclined to transgression fear. What is the challenge of this creation? How is it essential for performing artists? Is it their relationship with time? The end of a world? The proximity of this humanity described with precision and derision, made of tenderness, cruelty, but above all of shared, flickering, failing memories? Paradoxically, the play carries a message of hope, that of an early morning described by Winnie, a little lady who is declining in her hole, and by her old husband Willy, hidden behind her with a false indifference... written with the sometimes cynical humor of the Irish writer and his science of dramaturgy.

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