Detta barn

DETTA BARN (Cet enfant), en pjäs av den franska dramatikern och regissören Joël Pommerat togs fram i samtal med folk kring relationen föräldrar barn i en stad i Normandie. 

I en serie scener går Pommerat till djupet med föräldra-barnrelationens bindningar på ett finkänsligt och subtilt sätt. Han skapar en spänning i den sparsamma dialogen som visar på familjenrelationernas skörhet och känslighet.

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A pregnant woman muses on how bringing up her child will enable her to revenge herself on her negligent parents. A five-year old daughter visiting her divorced father tells him she is content to never see him again. A mother faces the ordeal of visiting a police mortuary to see if a corpse is her son’s body. Pommerat stretches familial tensions to breaking point, revealing the anxieties, fears and desires that link us as children to parents and parents to children. This Child has been widely performed and acclaimed throughout France and won the Critics Association Award for Best Play in 2006. The eleven scenes do not follow a narrative thread and the reading that took place at the Theatre Café Symposium led to a remarkable debate amongst the sixty delegates. The majority of those present spoke at least once and it was notable how each imagined the scenes presented in quite different ways. The nature of this compelling text is that each viewer can’t help but want to finish or resolve these unfinished stories; This Child creates an unusually high level of engagement from audiences. I have seen it generate an intense response in three very different arenas; in Avignon in the original production by Pommerat in 2006 before an audience of 1200; in a girls’ school performance at a small conference in the spring of 2007; and at Theatre Café with a company formed of 7 professional and 5 youth theatre actors.

  THIS CHILD Drawing on conversations with women from a Normandy town, Pommerat has created a text about the bond between parents and children. In a series of subtle, narratively restrained scenes, he digs deep into the tensions and strains within this bond, exploring the fractures in family life. A pregnant woman muses on how bringing up her child will enable her to revenge herself on her negligent parents. A five-year old daughter visiting her divorced father tells him she is content to never see him again. A mother faces the ordeal of visiting a police mortuary to see if a corpse is her son’s body. Pommerat stretches familial tensions to breaking point, revealing the anxieties, fears and desires that link us as children to parents and parents to children. This Child has been widely performed and acclaimed throughout France and won the Critics Association Award for Best Play in 2006. The eleven scenes do not follow a narrative thread and the reading that took place at the Theatre Café Symposium led to a remarkable debate amongst the sixty delegates. The majority of those present spoke at least once and it was notable how each imagined the scenes presented in quite different ways. The nature of this compelling text is that each viewer can’t help but want to finish or resolve these unfinished stories; This Child creates an unusually high level of engagement from audiences. I have seen it generate an intense response in three very different arenas; in Avignon in the original production by Pommerat in 2006 before an audience of 1200; in a girls’ school performance at a small conference in the spring of 2007; and at Theatre Café with a company formed of 7 professional and 5 youth theatre actors.