• Saturday 4 February 2012 - 20h30
• Sunday 5 February 2012 - 15h00

GREAT ANGER
Directed by Alain Françon and Blandine Masson, Serge Merlin revisits Thomas Bernhard’s words, their strength, the generosity of a never assuaged fury.

Throughout his existence, Thomas Bernhard –born in 1931- kept filling his work with indignant fury against his country, Austria, whose active participation to Nazism he could never accept, and he did so with enough good conscience so that he never gave it much of a second thought, and barely regretted it. Published in 1986, Extinction drives the point home, as if the author knew that it would be his last book. “I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of” he writes. A sentence that Serge Merlin, acquainted with Thomas Bernhard’s plays, takes on with all the strength of his unusual talent. A burning presence, he is here, he talks, remembers, comes, goes, listens, makes one hear and feel the infinite variety of keys springing from a raw anger, fed by suffering, doubt, generosity and sometimes self deprecation. Something rare and warm, filled with the questions raised by human history.

Colette Godard