Mon grand amour

We find ourselves in the living room of a small, modest, to all intents and purposes banally furnished flat that appears to have no history. Just a few metres from the dining table, TV and phone, we become witnesses to three different stories about people who are experiencing a loss. A policeman who has devoted his entire life to his work makes a telephone call in obvious distress. He has made a serious mistake and has been suspended from duty. As this becomes clear to him, he wavers between despair, resignation and the desire to not give up without a fight. A couple can no longer live together. She has decided to leave. He sits motionless at the dining table, she brings tea. Suddenly the phone rings: it is her aunt. She explains to her why they are breaking up. She speaks Vietnamese. An old man stands by the window, loses himself in memories, listens to answerphone messages and speaks to his dead wife. It appears that his life consists of not much more than the past. Each new person we encounter in the three stories adds a charge to the initially anonymous-seeming room, transforming it into an inhabited, intimate space in which the audience shares the life stories of apparent strangers — with all their hurts and wounds. After the large-scale French-Vietnamese historical narrative »SAIGON «, presented at FIND in 2018, Caroline Guiela Nguyen returns to the festival with a theatre production on the smallest scale: in a private Berlin flat, not far from the Schaubühne, she creates a hyper-realist portrait of the everyday realities of four different people who are losing something — and, in her production, simultaneously subverts and counteracts these realities.

Caroline Guiela Nguyen (*1981, Poissy) has directed at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe and at the Festival d’Avignon and is a member of La Comédie de Valence artist collective at the Centre dramatique national Drôme-Ardèche. In 2009, she founded her company, Les Hommes Approximatifs. She has been nominated for the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and for a Molière as Best Contemporary Writer; in 2019 she won the Jürgen Bansemer & Ute Nyssen Award for Dramatists for »SAIGON« which featured at the Festival d’Avignon. She will soon direct at the Schaubühne.  

Scenography, Lighting Design: Caroline Guiela Nguyen Sound Design: Antoine
Richard, Dramaturgy: Jérémie Scheidler
Costume Design: Dominique Fournier
Assistant Director: Pauline Dubreuil

With: Luc Bataïni, Madeline James, Alexandre Michel, Habib Azaoui