Les Oubliés. Alger - Paris.

With a stage writing approach, Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot gather three generations of actors from the Comédie-Française, each having a different understanding of the recent story of the Algerian war.

Starting from the “point of view” of individuals in their thirties, which they are part of, they question the way in which history is made.

After finding an interest in the history of Europe from 1945 to the present day (especially in the tetralogy Europe, my love), this creation is part of a new cycle thought around the Fifth Republic, born in retrospect of the collapse of the French colonial policy.

In 1958, René Coty calls out for the providential man – the general De Gaulle – to find a way out of what was then called “Algerian events”. De Gaulle accepts on the condition that a new constitution is adopted. In 1962, Algeria’s independence is eventually declared.

That is the contextual framework of this creation. The artistic challenge is linked to the necessity of understanding how and why the unsaid and the taboos of this time period remain, which has taken so long to be called and defined as a war. Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot explain: “those hollows and silences of the Government and families, which once had the virtue to enable us to look towards the future, meet their limits today”.

They focus on a “policy of oblivion” and a society in need of collective memory. It is in a crossbreeding of playing registers and a crossover of different types of speech that the show, anchored in the present and in metropolitan France, opens up to the “great history”. Through flash-back sequences, they summon speeches and conversations from the antechambers of the presidential palace. Far from the pamphlet, they deliver a theatre of burns, full of symbols and inspired by real facts.

Created in 2019

Text and direction Julie Bertin & Jade Herbulot – The Birgit Ensemble

With Sylvia Bergé, Éric Génovèse, Bruno Raffaelli, Jérôme Pouly, Serge Bagdassarian, Nâzim Boudjenah, Danièle Lebrun, Elliot Jenicot, Pauline Clément

Production La Comédie-Française / Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier
With the support of the Chartreuse de Villeneuve les Avignon – Centre national des écritures du spectacle

Past representations
2019, January 24th-March 10th [CREATION] Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Comédie-Française, Paris (75)