"Solitude on a set is a very violent experience"Éric Elmosnino is accompanied on stage

You play *Stella Maris* at Printemps des Comédiens. What made you want to participate in this project around Roberto Bolaño?

We were finishing the tour of *Misanthrope* created in Montpellier and we wanted to work together again. It turns out that Éric Bart, the director of the Printemps des Comédiens festival, had seen a magnificent show in Chile on Bolaño. He suggested to Georges Lavaudant that they create something based on Roberto Bolaño. He talked to Mélodie Richard and me about it, and we accepted without hesitation.

You didn’t know BolañoÂ’s work?

No way. I was totally ignorant on the matter. I even thought that he was a fairly confidential author, before discovering that he was in reality a true cult figure in contemporary literature.

The show is difficult to define. Is it a portrait of a writer, an investigation or a literary reverie? How would you present it?

The term “literary reverie” seems fair enough to me. This looks a lot like what Georges Lavaudant likes to do. He has this ability to establish an atmosphere, to create a universe in which everyone can project their own story. The show takes as its starting point an abandoned campsite called Estrella del Mar. It is a place haunted by memories, a place where we return to evoke events past, encounters, loved women. This decor becomes a point of support from which Bolaño’s work can be heard.

The actors are a component of the staging

Georges Lavaudant speaks of a “theater of listening and reverie”.

It’s very linked to its visual and sound universe, to the lights, to the music. We, the actors, are a component of this whole. The most complex thing was to draw a common thread to guide our trajectory. I play a sort of double of Bolaño, while Mélodie Richard brings to life the female figures of her novels. Chilean poetry, once translated, asks me, who remains very down to earth, to agree to let go, to open up to lyricism without falling into excess. The show is built in small touches and remains, for us too, a mysterious journey.

This project could have taken the form of a single-stage project. But you refused it. Why did you insist on the presence of Mélodie Richard?

His presence changes everything. She is an extraordinary actress with whom I felt a rare and immediate connection fromThe Misanthrope. Beyond this complicity, absolute solitude on a set is an experience of great violence, which I have already experienced twice in the past. I understand what some actors come to seek there, this immense gratification of keeping an audience alone for an hour and a half. But as far as I’m concerned, the psychological cost – the stage fright, the anxiety, the loneliness in the dressing room before and after the performance – far exceeds the artistic pleasure.

You are not Fabrice Luchini.

(Laughs) I respect him a lot, it’s very good. I see exactly this kind of incredible pleasure that one can have in existing alone on a set. It turns out that I wanted to taste it too and there you go, it’s not my thing.

Georges Lavaudant says he thought of you for this mixture of humor and melancholy which characterizes you. Did he hit the nail on the head?

Melancholy has indeed always been a traveling companion. As for humor, I hope that we will succeed in infusing Bolaño’s humor into the show. Georges says with a smile that he has the impression of staging a requiem, and the play is in fact very twilight. However, Bolaño possessed a formidable desperate humor, a biting irony in the face of his own finitude, since he knew he was condemned by illness. It is this complex nuance, between seriousness and irony, that I seek to bring out on stage.

The play evokes a writer who knows he is doomed and who writes against time. Did this dimension particularly strike you?

This lucidity in the face of death upsets me. We are all faced with this question, and the more time passes, the more concrete it becomes. What do we do with our lives when we learn that time is running out? How do we continue to live, to create, to love? I don’t know how to answer these questions, but they strongly run through this show and resonate within me.

During the first weekend of Printemps des Comédiens, we saw Laure Calamy attending different shows. Do you also like hanging out at theater festivals?

I passionately love this excitement, even if it has been a very long time since I participated in a festival. It’s actually my very first time here, at the Printemps des Comédiens. Like many actors, I mostly wandered around Avignon. A festival can be a very exciting place, even if it can sometimes be rough with the artists. But what I remember above all is this moment when hundreds of people come together around the same love of theater. As long as this desire to share stories exists, I find it very reassuring.”