Flavy continued to thunder away: “For example? You want to know what, for example, you could have done? You could have defended yourself! For example! Taken a swing at him! For example! That is, you could have, if you had the…” Flavy paused dramatically.
“The what? Go ahead! Say it!”
“You want me to say it?”
“Yeah, I want you to say it! Go ahead! Say it!”
“If you had the balls!”
“The balls? You want to see what I have the balls for? I’ll show you what I have the balls for!”
Things were getting out of control.
“Okay, okay—” said Flavy with a placating gesture.
A distracted look came over Boehlmer’s face. “The stage!” he cried. “What’s happening on stage?”
“On stage? You want to know what’s happening on stage?” Flavy regained the full force of his anger. “What’s happening on stage is that you’re fired! More than fired, you’ve been replaced! Favorably replaced!”
“What?” But Boehlmer didn’t need to be told twice. He grabbed the tricolor scarf from me — I still don’t know why — and charged out of the dressing room. It didn’t take long for us to realize the catastrophe that would result from a near-naked Boehlmer rushing out onstage to attack his own character. We took off after him. Successive stampedes down the metal staircase that leads to the stage set it shaking. We heard the authoritarian “shh!” of the stage manager Jean-Pierre Capelier who, working the stage lights, looked more than a little unsettling in his black clothes, black facemask, and black gloves. Flavy managed to trip Boehlmer just as he was about to run out on stage. He then completed his maneuver by hitting Boehlmer on the head with a wooden doorstop that happened to be within reach. I can bear witness to the fact that he apologized as he struck. The stage’s side curtain reacted with a silent shudder.
The sounds of pursuit and capture had been heard by the actors but not the spectators — except perhaps those in the first rows. On stage the actors showed remarkable professionalism, discipline, and presence of mind in refraining from looking over at us. No sooner was Boehlmer unconscious than Flavy had me call a doctor. And then, within moments, he was back under the spell cast by the Usurper and the originality of what was transpiring on stage. The newest member of our troupe displayed a freshness and skill that calmed us in the face of disaster (though this was a calm mixed with cowardice). Given our other options, it seemed best to let things take their course, to continue our quiet study. Transfixed, as it were, by the silver lining of his misfortune, Flavy was rapidly taking notes, finding himself almost convinced — as he was to confess later — of the superiority of the Usurper’s dramaturgical ideas. He even went so far as to consider offering him a place in the troupe, effective immediately.
Up to this point we’d all been hoping that the Usurper would, if nothing else, continue to follow the script. These hopes were soon dashed, however, as it became clear that the man playing the Republican Théodore Soufissis (the rebellious object of the aforementioned presidential ingratitude) had begun to deviate from the text of Flavy’s play. By his own admission, Marcel Flavy is by no means a revolutionary writer, and does not personally share the radical theses of his character Soufissis, or even those of the other more or less Souffisian figures whom the president encounters during his adventure. Flavy’s general intention was to advocate a certain tolerance without presenting the political theories of this or that individual in any detail. What he wanted to explore were the dramatic possibilities of the encounter between the two main characters — and to play upon the traces of past complicity resting beneath present resentment. Flavy’s text is about a friendship confronted with an ambition that has become too great to share. Complicating Flavy’s undertaking was the people’s image of Théodore Soufissis — held up as he is in our Republic as a hero whose life was rich in accident and adventure, full of a Romanticism remote from any Realpolitik.
The Usurper, however, did not allow his character to slide down the slippery slope of outraged stoicism, as is called for in Flavy’s play (a development very much in accord with what we know of the historical Soufissis). He kept to his lines, and yet at the same time began to rebel against it. At first this was done almost imperceptibly. Only gradually did his undermining of the text become clear. The Usurper succeeded thereby in slowly unsettling the usually effortless assurance of Jean-François Ernu, and, thereby, of the President. At first it was a discrete clinamen, a slight deviation in the orderly descent of textual atoms — a not absent in one place and slipped in somewhere else. Ernu soon found himself forced to embark on uncertain waters — responding to unexpected objections from his costar with only his own distant memories of Republican history as a guide (happily, he had brushed up a bit in preparation for his role). Despite his immense skill as an actor, it must be noted that Jean-François Ernu has never much liked — nor, indeed, excelled at — improvisation. It’s a part of the profession that’s always cost him enormous effort, and in which he never willingly engaged. The Usurper began to speak a bit more slowly — less, it seemed, to leave Ernu more time for reflection than so that Botsinas would have time to turn the pages of the volume spread on his lap.
Before long it became obvious that Soufissis (or, rather, the current possessor of the role) had had enough. A ripple of uncertainty went through the troupe when he revealed the true identity of the disguised President a quarter of an hour earlier than was called for. He then let fall a scathingly ironic — and genuinely clever — turn of phrase, leading to a burst of laughter at the expense of the President’s dignity. Remarkably, neither I nor any other member of the company was able to retain or reconstruct its precise phrasing. It was something to the effect that the once-rich cloak of sovereignty had been reduced to bits of moth-eaten something or other, riddled with holes, gnawed by worms…anyway, in bad shape. But said much better, so much better — I assure you. In the concentrated space of an image, he gave a radical critique of a government as craven as it was inept.
Ernu, in the role of the offended President, hesitated between forced laughter and blind rage. He shot an imploring look in the direction of Sylvestre Pascal-Bram, who was playing his advisor, but who was, if anything, at even more of a loss than him, and thus incapable of offering impromptu counsel. Nevertheless, he did do something. Like the lieutenant who reacts to a dressing down from a captain by laying into a sergeant, Pascal-Bram launched into a vulgar tirade against Annie Soulemenov. Shown the way by his authoritarian finger, she exited through the garden and collapsed in tears onto a pile of old curtains the moment she was out of sight. Her final exit had taken place twenty minutes ahead of schedule, a tragedy for a young actress, augmented by the fact that the turn events had taken deprived her — as she was to repeat later on — of no fewer than four lines (three, by my count, but still).