Le Mystère du gant
Vaudeville à table

A pastiche whose author, Roger Dupré, does not exist, a pretext for reviving a popular genre, Le Mystère du gant is an absurd vaudeville, a table reading whose characters, settings, actions and situations exist only in the public imagination.

Staging

We sit in on a play reading by two actors.

As the public enters, a table and two chairs stand centre stage. Functional furniture necessary for reading a text. From this sober installation the audience project themselves into the story of the actors. They make up their own idea of ​​the characters, and create a mental architecture of the décor. They imagine and embroider.

Let them do it, it's beautiful.

A few simple props appear throughout the show, small theatrical artifices: balloons, a fake arm, moustaches... As if the actors, getting more and more into the game of reading, had taken what they had on hand to illustrate their point, going deeper into the characters and plots.

The increasing absurdity creates a profusion of images and twists by the end of the play. A tempest of twists and turns overflows into the room, the audience become part of the intrigue.

The play is no longer read but performed by the actors, but nothing is added to the scenography, we’re in the same place, the viewer mentalises.

The denouement is coming and everything could end there,

but…

Suddenly a complete set appears, or at least the idea of ​​a set incorporating the elements and objects present in the room, a very busy and colourful, almost abstract, evocation of the living room in which the play Le Mystère du gant could have been performed. A large painted curtain unrolls in the background, pop-up objects appear on stage, a fake jet of water shoots out of the wings

The austerity of a undressed stage suddenly gives way to a multitude of pictorial objects in the centre of which the actors change scale, drown, almost disappear.

The set which suddenly appeared at the very end of the show, remains visible until the audience leaves, underlining the derision, the weight of the imagination and the absolute volatility of the theatre. Going from asceticism to overload leaves the audience with an absurd and aberrant image of the performance they have just witnessed.