Cécile Garcia Fogel has created an irreverent and outspoken work from the words of Claire Bretécher, seamlessly stitching together dialogues from her cartoons and interviews from the national archives. On stage, she and Valérie Dashwood form a strikingly tight and hilarious duo, visibly enjoying slipping into the roles of a variety of ridiculous and endearing characters. Once the word “cartoonist” had only a masculine form in French, something Claire Bretécher preferred to laugh about. With her rapier-like and somewhat wicked pen, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, she never missed an opportunity to mock her contemporaries. Independent right to the tip of her pen, Bretécher never aligned herself with any particular feminist movement, yet her drawings contributed to women’s liberation. Here is a work that tells men to make way, and it’s about time too!

Louise Sablon