Carcassonne. “Sarah is an actress like me, we have a common quest”

the essential
Christelle Reboul will play Sarah Bernhardt in the play George and Sarah by Thierry Lassalle, on July 6 at 9:30 p.m. in the main courtyard of the Château Comtal in Carcassonne. Meeting with the actress, rich in her career and her vision of the world.

What are the founding elements of your career?

I can’t overlook Our Dear Neighbors, which inevitably made me gain popularity. It was a crazy work intensity. It remains something unique and founding. There is also what made me want to do this job: Catherine Mouchet in Therese, a movie I saw when I was 14. I said to myself that I wanted to be an actress, to be able to transmit what this actress transmits. She is a mirror of such humanity, of feelings, of delicacy. When I was 20, I saw one of Sandrine Veysset’s films: Will there be snow at Christmas?, with Dominique Reymond. I really liked the beauty with which she films and today I had the chance to shoot with her. With her, we are suddenly inside. Theatrically, the characters I play are part of my journey. I will play Elvira in festivals, after Carcassonne, it is a character inhabited by a spirituality that elevates us and we learn from it, as I learn from other characters.

In the room George and Sarahyou play the actress Sarah Bernhardt, an actress who plays an actress, how did you immerse yourself in the character?

That was really the first question I asked myself. For me, she is a femme fatale, seductive, endowed with a freedom that is as sexual as it is mental and cultural. She started in a form of misery, she had to forge herself and she became free. It was incredible to be so free, for his time. She was bisexual, slept for money, without people’s eyes being a problem for her. I wondered how I was going to embody this star who was like the Madonna of the 19th century. She is the first actress who went all over the world, even to Australia. We had freedom to appropriate the text. George meets Sarah in an inn she rents in Brittany. Sarah is retired, she is working on the character of Phèdre and confuses the character’s life with her own, Freud had said that she had gone to the other side of the mirror. Sarah was an inspiring character for me because she brings out the boundary between play and reality, which can be dangerous but must be mastered. Sarah is an actress like me and we have a common quest.

Did you have difficulties with this border between the game and reality?

Yes I had. They completely calmed down, transformed, when my daughter arrived. All of a sudden reality became so strong, much more so than fiction. It allowed me to go into fiction and to be able to come back to reality. Before, I put a lot more forces into fiction than into reality, now the two forces have become balanced. I actually loved my life. When I go into fiction now, it’s no longer an escape but a choice, a journey that I choose.

What changes for you between a piece set in the 19th century and today?

The costumes: it’s our skin, for us who are actors. For this piece, Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz designed them. Sarah Bernhardt has a whole stripping throughout the play that goes through her costumes: the costume and the corset give such a different presence on stage. The difference is obvious between a period character and a modern character. Femininity was not at all translated in the same sartorial and therefore moral way.

What message do you think this female rivalry between George and Sarah carries in the play?

It is the freedom of women because it is their fight. So, as much as George Sand really fought, until taking a male name and dressing like a man. She needed to fight that way. Sarah, it’s as if she were somewhere else. For her, it was not a fight but she was like that, she imposed herself. George, as much as Sarah, must have experienced discrimination. But Sarah, it’s like it’s sliding over her, she stays straight and strong. She played a lot with the power of men, she was a very great manipulator: the important thing was her art and everything was possible to achieve her art. These are two fights that are not in the same place. Sarah is a state: she is free. George wrote about his fight but Sarah didn’t write about hers. We know from her story that her mother was a prostitute, who abandoned her when she was 5 years old. She lived in this atmosphere of a man, she was abused, left to fend for herself. There is a huge shell around her and she thought she was dying all the time. She went so far as to sleep in a coffin. Because of her traumas and her fragile health, everything was a reprieve for her.

Single price: 43 euros.

Carcassonne. “Sarah is an actress like me, we have a common quest”