# 1 DOM JUAN OR THE FEAST WITH THE STATUE

 

 

Created by Jean Lambert-wild, Lorenzo Malaguerra and Marc Goldberg

 

Here, the creative team behind DOM JUAN OR THE FEAST WITH THE STATUE shares diary entries about their new show. 

 

 

 

From the start, we thought that it had to be hot on stage. Not hot like in a nightclub or a sauna, tired tropes to represent seduction. Hot in a physical way, done by setting the story in less temperate climes so as to see all sorts of things grow: physical affections, climbing plants, boredom. Why? As is often the case, everything started with an intuition around which we could create meaning and make decisions about the acting. We intuited something about Dom Juan’s temperament and his encounter with Jean Lambert-wild’s clown. We will explore this in more details in future entries, but for now we’ll say that we were looking for temperance rather than ardour or anger. Temperance, maybe even a form of nonchalance, although we say this with a pinch of salt as it wouldn’t be right to make the character meek and languid. For us, heat gave meaning to the erosion of his soul, his loss of moral values, the fact that Dom Juan turns around social conventions in a particularly violent way because there is no society around him, apart from a few other characters who, like him, are lost in the jungle. 

We have built our Dom Juan or The Feast with the statuefrom this single physical element. If we were to look for continuity between our last creations together – Richard III, Roberto Zucco, Yotaro in the land of the Yokais– we could say that we’ve always looked to put these ‘heroes’ in environments with very specific or particular constraints (a fairground construction, a panopticon, the spirit world). These reinforce the characters’ solitude and somehow separate them from the world of the living. 

 

This uncanny power is at the heart of all our previous shows and with Dom Juan it takes a rather extreme form. In the sumptuous set: a jungle, are actors who actually had few chances of one day being on stage together: very young actors, (Swiss) musicians more used to chanson and cabaret than theatre, and Steve Tientcheu, a formidable actor who starred in Alice Diop’s Danton’s Death. Of course, we thought these geographic, social, intergenerational encounters were very risky, but we also felt they had incredible theatrical potential. With these encounters, it became absolutely clear that our project, our Dom Juan, was not going to be like any other before. It could even escape us because it was absolutely impossible for us to predict what this combination of people would produce. 

 

Ideally: a fabulous monster…

Carnet de bord #1 > Dom Juan ou Le Festin de pierre > Nicolas Verdier, comédien de la Séquence 9 de L'Académie de l'Union

Show

Having read the plethora of different literary, theatrical and whimsical versions of the myth of Dom Juan, Jean Lambert...