La Musica, La Musica deuxième (1965-1985)

A major figure of theatrical research, he explores gesture and the spoken word, every intonation becoming a challenge to stretch words like arrows. The high standards he sets are equal to his almost mystical approach to drama: the actor is the purveyor of a divine inspiration, speech is action. And the spoken word is the backbone of the La Musica deuxième: a dialogue between a man and a woman in the privacy of a hotel bar in a provincial town. They once loved each other and have met to finalise the act of separation, their divorce. Things that had been left unsaid resurface during this final exploration of a story they thought they had understood from beginning to end. Twenty years after La Musica, Marguerite Duras wrote an “act 2” in 1985: “La Musica was no longer a situation, a state of love becoming undone. With the second act I think I introduce what you call characters”, the author commented when it was first produced. Anatoli Vasiliev comes up with a new partition of this diptych in which the characters, as Duras describes, experience “an inner shift towards the greatest truth, the greatest sincerity”.