Nicolas Bouchaud Un vivant qui passe
d’après Claude Lanzmann

Following on from the adaptation of the novel by Thomas Bernhard Maîtres Anciens (Old Masters) the director and writer Nicolas Bouchaud continues his exploration of non-theatre texts for the stage. The book Un vivant qui passe (A Visitor from the Living), the transcription of an interview conducted by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah, lies at the heart of this new show.

For his documentary Shoah, Claude Lanzmann interviews Maurice Rossel, former representative of the International Red Cross, in Berlin. On the 23^rd June 1944, the young Rossel set off to inspect the Terezin « show ghetto » or « ghetto Potemkine » in the former Czechoslovakia. Hoodwinked by the staging orchestrated by the nazis, he neither saw nor understood what was going on. From the encounter between this man and the director was born another film, followed by a book, Un vivant qui passe. In it, Claude Lanzmann poses a central question : what is seeing? In the company of his long-term collaborators Éric Didry and Véronique Timsit, Nicolas Bouchaud uses this testimony as a way of asking if this passive spectator of barbarism was in fact the voice of a commonplace form of antisemitism ever present in the contemporary world. Similar to the cinematographer, the artistic gesture of the actor-creator invites us, by means of the stage, to reinvent, over and over again, the passing on of the story of the Shoah.