This Wednesday evening, the Uzès Festival alone on stage (Fuss) opened its 2026 edition with Alex Lutz and his show Sexe, grog et rocking-chair. Horses on the Umbrière stage, dazzling humor and intimate emotion accompanied the kick-off of the festival dear to Patrick Timsit.
From May 6 to 9, 2026, the Uzès Seuls en Scène festival returns to Umbrière with a program built around theater, alone-on-stage, humor and artistic encounters. Created and run by Patrick Timsit, the annual meeting which is growing, pursues a line on a human, family scale.
Among others, Philippe Corti, Philippe Caverivière, Marie-Claude Pietragalla, Danièle Thompson are present this year. HAS” We were quickly full. There is this place, l’Ombrière, which seemed too big and now which is too small, and then there are the volunteers and the inhabitants who have made this festival their own “, confides Patrick Timsit.
Alex Lutz, stage brilliance
The kick-off of this edition was entrusted to Alex Lutz. This Wednesday, it was the French artist, freshly molierized, who raised the curtain with Sex, grog and rocking chairs. A show lasting almost 2h30 presented in front of a conquered Umbrière, standing. Awarded the Molière for humor, this one-on-one performance created at the Cirque d’Hiver marked the Uze public with its balance, its introspection, its emotion and its bursts of laughter in the room. Touching and brilliant.
Jeans, denim jacket from Nîmes of course, white t-shirt, cowboy boots and shoulder-length blond hair, he appears stuck behind a glass door that refuses to open. Everything seems to be buggy. Then he returns to the stage astride Nilo, his white horse, turning slowly on the imaginary track that he recreated on the Ombrière stage, evoking the recent death of his father Gérard.
The subject which could be heavy is treated by Alex Lutz in a light, funny but moving way. Accompanied by a rock soundtrack, from the Rolling Stones to Cat Stevens, it unfolds a show full of humorous outbursts. It sounds true from start to finish.
Hilarious
One of the most striking moments remains this sequence in which the artist describes the body he dreams of having before pushing the absurd to the point of creating a dialogue with his own testicles, crushed during a motorcycle ride. A cult scene as it sums up his art which is to transform an intimate confidence into an absurd scene treated with disconcerting calm. And the body? An exceptional expressiveness in which each gesture is precise, carefully studied, terribly true. He plays on human contradictions, social awkwardness, social tics, clumsiness, ridiculous behavior, bourgeois codes, ordinary violence. His face tells the joke before it’s even said. With Alex Lutz, the speed of light is greater than the speed of sound.
More than a comedian, Alex Lutz appears to be a true actor of composition. An unusual artist. From the melancholy horseman to the drunken companion of the deceased father, he moves from one character to another with virtuosity, playing as much with silences and gestures as with dialogues.
Throughout the show, the artist also paints a tender and lucid portrait of several generations, that of the sixty-eighters, idealistic and battered, and that of their children, raised with unemployment, AIDS and uncertainties. Generations trying to understand each other, sometimes clumsily, sometimes too late.
With this opening that is at once intimate, funny and deeply embodied, Uzès Seuls en Scène has launched an edition faithful to its identity, a festival that is accessible, warm, family-oriented and centered above all on the meeting between artists and public.
The full program is here
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