A hospital bed beige and ugly bar scene

Two short texts (a written for one actor, the other two) played in a minimal device. Thirty-four years between them. "The night just before the forests", given at the workshop, is the first piece of the great playwright French BernardMarie Koltès, died in 1983. "Identity", presented at the Bastille, is the recent work of a man of plural Theatre (author, actor, Director), Gérard Watkins - elle is awarded the grand prize for dramatic literature 2010.

The two have in common to say the world with pain, flush skin and timely. Two furiously contemporary pieces that speak of the margin, the exclusion of the totalitarian logic that shreds the men. Two manifests political and intimate, loaded symbols. Patrice Chéreau had previously never dared to set up the first work of Koltès, his accomplice "dramatic". Gérard Watkins wrote "Identity" on a whim of anger, following the nomination of Thierry Mariani to use DNA testing to validate some family reunifications. Their writing is different, but with "The night" and "Identity", the impression is to touch the flesh of the theatre. A live theatre, affecting us, moves us and we alert.

In "the night just before the forests" a man beaten (to death) by of using engages an unknown - to simply talk to him, telling his life before it's too late. The man is a stranger, victim of ambient racism. He is unemployed or rather wants more work. He refuses the ghettos of the city. He preaches the anarchy, the general strike. It has thirst for love, friendship. Upon entry into the theatre Hall, the mass is so-called. A hospital bed, beige and ugly, bar scene. Romain Duris expected under the sheets that the light is turned off. First it Aspen, shudder, before speaking - speaking, exhaustion. Wet of sweat - rain-, bright eyes, he plays each gesture, each word, with fever, as if it were the last. Pushed into his entrenchments by Chéreau, actor scrolls a lifetime of desires and bitterness before our eyes. Images collide, dark, heartbreaking. Death captures the bright. The ghost of Koltès monologue carries us in his poetic spiral up to the trance.

"Identity" is a tale in the form of true-false slice of life. A couple penniless discovers a curious label on a bottle of wine: the EU launches a kind of game where you can earn money - simply call a freephone number. Selected, Marion and André Klein are invited to find / prove their origins - really are the son and the daughter of their father and mother

Man plays the game, up to dig up his mother dead, to provide a trace of DNA. The woman resists. At all. It is a "non-publicized" hunger strike And mocked the ties of blood. These are all short links, those of fleeting love - impossible -between two beings, that matter. The exhibit is incisive, terrible - in its reference to the stalk of the Vél'Hiv-, dense and open. Gérard Watkins put it dramatically staged. White space, a lint beige carpet without end, a blinding light... the couple struggles spotlight. Anne-Lise Heimburger and Fabien Orcier play sober and hard way. The words sound harsh and violent.

In both cases, the return to the real - so close to fiction - is brutal. After such evenings shocks can be reassured: Theatre invents yet.