“Edmée”, from peasant farce to gore parody
With Antoinette Rychner at the pen and the duo Florence Minder-Julien Jaillot at the baton, the vaudeville of the 1950s is reborn in the form of a cathartic bloodbath.
The bomb Edmée (Jeanne De Mont) surrounded by her brats: the cop (Aurélien Gschwind), the husband (Valeria Bertolotto, in the foreground) and the Polish worker (Léonard Bertholet).
MELANIE GROLEY
For its 75th birthday, Le Poche had promised to revisit its classics. He was therefore not going to miss this 1950s hit that was “Edmée”, a boulevard comedy performed more than a hundred times in the Old Town before touring as far as London – a first. The original author Pierre-Aristide Bréal (a regular on the program “Au Théâtre ce soir”) is now replaced by the playwright from the Romandie region Antoinette Rychner (“Arlette”, “Pieces de guerre en Suisse”, or l excellent novel “The Price”). For its part, the already strong tandem of two creations at Mathieu Bertholet, Julien Jaillot and Florence Linder, supplants William Favre in the staging.
Already cheeky at the time, the plot was duly inflated with contemporary helium. No need to press for humor and excess to spurt out, but also blood and impropriety. Initially, a Gironde and venal country girl does not shrink from any misdeed to pocket the imminent inheritance of her aunt-in-law. On arrival, an alpine version of Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill” indiscriminately fights her hillbilly husband, her Polish seasonal Ken or her sidekick gendarme gigolo to snatch the jackpot that never ceases to be expected. . Even chene and grand-aunt in turn, she still hasn’t seen the color of it…
At the age of 110, Edmée has still not touched the hoard for which she has drawn blood.
MELANIE GROLEY
Until the caricature, the text will flaunt neoxenophobia and inverted sexism, against a backdrop of harsh economic reality in the agricultural environment. Allusions will fuse, here to the coronavirus, to the Raiffeisen bank, to the LPP or to a trial by Mona Chollet, there to bovine insemination, to fake bio or to egg freezing for lesbian parenthood. In a somewhat tense political context between our urban and rural communities, the second surprisingly takes it for her rank, which presupposes a certain courage, modeled on that of the Edmée bombshell: “What a woman!” don’t we hear the dialogues punctuated like a refrain from 1951.
The ingredient of the yeti, essential to a contemporary reinterpretation of boulevard theatre.
MELANIE GROLEY
In the end, like the previous two vaudevilles of the season, “Edmée” offers the public postmodern post-Covid entertainment. Incidentally, the show celebrates the theater’s pretenses, thanks to which the beaten get up unscathed and the spectators purge themselves of hemoglobin. Above all, it highlights the know-how of the house troupe in 2023, illustrated here by the volcanic Jeanne De Mont, the convulsive Aurélien Gschwind, the wavering Léonard Bertholet and the amazing Valeria Bertolotto, marvelous with ambiguity and humor. as a broken husband.
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Boulevard du Poche – “Edmée”, from peasant farce to gore parody