Une chose vraie

How does a young actress cope with the knowledge that she has an early-onset form of Alzheimer's disease? How do you change your outlook on the irreversible and cohabit with the inexorable? Drawing on the life of actress Ysanis Padonou and the complicity that unites them, Romain Gneouchev offers a show that resembles an intimate documentary on the issue of neurodegenerative diseases.

A graduate of Strasbourg's École du Théâtre National, Romain Gneouchev's direction is based on the simplicity of the stage set and the vertigo of the narrative. Ysanis Padonou is alone on stage, in a space dotted with a few objects laid out on a white linoleum floor. A roller skate, an immortal rose, statuettes from Cameroon, tennis balls, a stuffed toy and a porcelain box bequeathed to her by her mother are all fragments of a memory that we see decomposing and recomposing over the course of the show. This emergence of the real responds to the young woman's need to break the taboo on illness that has always prevailed in her family. It also gives rise to some shocking revelations.