“DNA”, chilling mechanics of violence

“We were all folded, huh? Cathy’s story stumbles, with suspended hesitations, until the words fail: “So, we all (…) So… So… So he’s…” It’s John who finally blurts out: “Dead. He is dead. » What happened in this wood, near the school where John and his gang reign supreme? Adam, their scapegoat, seemed ready to endure anything to be accepted into their circle, and the game, “for fun, what”, Cathy repeats, went wrong.

For her first production, the young actress Marie Mahé uses a text by Briton Dennis Kelly: writing that adopts the precision of a scalpel and turns the stage into a fascinating dissecting table. The author cultivates there a sharp language, fragmented by unfinished sentences and other tics of language, like this haunting “I want to say”, as well as an art of the rebound which, layer after layer, increases the degree of horror .

Marie Mahé offers here a tight version around five characters, instead of the eleven of the original cast. She herself embodies Cathy, who zealously sides with the strongest. John, excellent Tigran Mekhitarian, is a schoolyard bully as pathetic as he is terrifyingly inconsequent. As for Léa (Léa Luce Busato, all in fragile nuances), she is the only one who wants to escape the poisonous spiral in which the teenagers have gotten stuck.

Phil, on the other hand, stays away from the guilty panic of his comrades: the only things that seem to interest him are the crisps and the waffles that he devours one by one, looking impassive, almost comical. However, under the lunar features of Maxime Boutéaron, Phil the silent appears in cold calculating as the most chilling character of DNA, whose title refers both to what will confuse an innocent in the place of murderous teenagers and of course to an attempt to decipher human nature.

In eighty minutes of extreme tension, the play plunges the viewer into the destructive mechanics of the group, with a powerful echo of the phenomenon of school bullying, tragic cases of which unfortunately often make the headlines.

The four young actors, dressed in the same uniform (sneakers and tracksuits), evolve on a stage almost empty except for a wooden bench and, in the background, the famous detail of the Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo, reproduced in street art style. With this intelligent and energetic show, with rather well-regarded springs, Marie Mahé makes a brilliant entry into a theater in tune with the times.

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