“The talent for ingratitude is often a requirement for performing a feat. Few creators have the gall of Yasmina Reza, although few are gifted with an inventiveness like hers,” wrote Judith Thurman in a profile she dedicated to her in The New Yorker in 2009. Playwright and storyteller, allergic to media exposure and torture of interviewers for her evasion, Yasmina Reza (Paris, 1959) is one of the most sagacious and ruthless portraitists of the contradictions, inconsistencies and weaknesses of human beings. Where she puts her eye she puts the bullet and likes to show her suffering characters as naked as that emperor by Hans Christian Andersen. One imagines her as a child dismembering articulated dolls to study their functioning and as a teenager kicking anyone in the shin under the table whoever was within range. To read this writer is to realize that human beings tend towards pathos: be it three friends arguing about an avant-garde painting (Art), two couples fighting over a school incident involving their children (A Wild God) or the troop of deranged people who populate the demolishing Happy the happy.
Did you want broth? Well, here you have three cups, because Hurricane Yasmina Reza arrives in triplicate: a short novel (Adam Haberberg), a monologue (Anne-Marie la Bella) and a volume that brings together her five great plays, including one (Bella figura) unpublished until now in Spanish.
This unpublished theatrical piece is in line with the author’s other pieces, who describes her creations as “comic tragedies”, a paradox that very well defines her literary production. In Bella figura we have a mess worthy of a comedy of affairs, with adulterous lovers and unexpected encounters in a restaurant. It is her last piece released so far; He wrote it at the request of the German director Thomas Ostermeier for the Schaubühne in Berlin, and the constants of his universe are present in it: it is the scathing portrait of a bourgeoisie with pretenses of sophistication, beneath whose glossy façade the cracks and layers of grime appear. in the form of hypocrisy, deception, neuroses and even existential crises.
Reza seems to show a little more empathy for the veteran actress who stars in the monologue Anne-Marie la Bella, which the author herself brought to the stage as director at the Téâtre de la Colline in Paris, in a unique production: the protagonist was played by duly cross-dressed, the actor André Marcon. The old woman monologues before an invisible journalist who asks her about Giselle Fayolle, Gigi, a recently deceased triumphant actress with whom Anne-Marie shared the stage, dressing room, friendship and rivalry. While Gigi was triumphing in the movies and with men (she tells us that it was rumored at the time that she was a lover of Alain Delon and Ingmar Bergman), poor Anne Marie did not have the right type for the screen and was relegated to the stage and then to oblivion. The character – who as a young girl was a provincial girl dazzled by Brigitte Bardot and went to Paris to pursue a career in the theater – is a tribute to those actors who never achieved the glittering status of stars. And at the same time a reflection on old age and its ailments, on the defeats that one has left along the way and on loneliness. Anne-Marie, widowed and with a son whom she barely sees, talks about herself because she finally has someone to listen to her: the journalist, the spectators of the performance, the readers of the book.
The author is much less kind to Adam Haberberg, the protagonist of the short novel. He is a petulant and narcissistic writer who, at forty-seven years old, is experiencing his lowest hours: his latest novel has been battered by critics, he has developed a bruise in his eye that according to his eye doctor could lead to glaucoma, and his marriage falls apart. We found him meditative and lost in thought at the Parisian Jardin des Plantes zoo, in front of the ostrich cage. And to add a few more drops of pathos to his situation, he runs into a former high school classmate he didn’t even remember anymore, who makes a living selling trinkets to tourists. Without really knowing how, he accepts this talkative and verbose woman’s invitation to have dinner at her suburban apartment. There Adam will discover something about the past. She reza handles with care the hidden tension of the long evening in which the pompous writer ends up discovering himself as naked and ridiculous as Andersen’s emperor.
