Singulis / La Messe là-bas ・ Comédie-Française

Paul Claudel has accompanied Didier Sandre for over fifty years. In 2020, he staged a one-man show adapting Claudel’s La Messe là-bas, a kind of liturgical poem, which he is reviving today.

“This text was composed during the First World War in Rio de Janeiro” he recalls. Paul Claudel, an ambassador at the time, viewed the surrounding luxuriant nature to be hostile in the divine plan. He was taking stock of his life at fifty, mulling over the bitter and the sweet while revisiting his fundamentals: his conversion, the revelation of Rimbaud, the failure of his monastic vocation, the failure of his encounter with the “rose” on the boat to China, the abandonment of the child he fathered adulterously, the consent to marriage “over there” and to “these children I had in my dreams”. But there is always the call of the sea, flight, exile and solitude . The quest for an absolute between the poetic work and the Christian incarnation of the soul. His bitterness found solace in a love binding him to God, an exhortation to the celebration of the mass, which is his way of reaching God, an exaltation of the Eucharist, experienced in its intimate destitution and as a carnal, cannibal, almost orgiastic union, as well as in the droll and disenchanted verve of the gaze he brings to bear on his fellow men. A ritual to contain the inner disorder, a congestive, exacerbated Catholicism to ward off inner defeat, the temptation of “ending everything”. A soul in crisis, calling upon a silent God, discussing “man to man” with this Father who sends men to sacrifice (he was writing in 1917).
For me, this is not about subscribing to a profession of faith, but to a poetic and theatrical work that identifies with the line in Saint John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word”.

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23 JAN

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