Les Suppliques

Twenty years ago, historian Laurent Joly discovered forty-seven boxes containing thousands of letters sent between 1941 and 1944 by Jewish families to the Vichy authorities. Based on meticulous investigative work, the Birgit Ensemble gives life and flesh to the archives.

How can the voices of these hundreds of anonymous French people, forgotten and neglected by the Vichy government, be brought to life? How to embody them? Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot plunge us into the heart of these intimate dramas played out during the Holocaust in France. Convinced of the injustice of their fate, hundreds of Jewish men and women wrote to Marshal Pétain, asking for the release of their loved ones or the right to practice their profession. Implacable, the administration systematically responded with a refusal to accept.

On the stage, four actresses and actors of several generations carry these moving fragments of life. The theater fills in the gaps left by history, knitting the threads of reality with those of fiction. The "hors-champ" of these letters is invented before our eyes, and life springs to life, at human level. Julie Bertin and Jade Herbulot have been renowned for nearly a decade for their shows weaving together political, historical and intimate narratives, turning our historical heritage into sensitive material. They make the voices of the past resonate with great power, and bring to the surface the questions they pose us today in all their acuity.