There are evenings like this when fate fights hard. At the beginning of February, at the Trianon (Paris 18th), Arnaud Tsamère saw an epic performance of 2 weddings and 1 funeralhis new single-on-stage.
It starts with a fire alarm set off untimely by a dazed or a bad joker. The room must be evacuated, delaying the start of the show by three quarters of an hour. It is then a balloon glass filled with water that does its thing. Placed on a high table, all it takes is a barely sudden movement from the comedian for it to break, without wobbling its foot, and empty itself by surprise. A few moments later, a spectator gets up, perhaps to go to the bathroom. Arnaud Tsamère has fun teasing him and does not have time to finish his valve when the man faints going up the aisle. The lights come back on. Help intervenes. Floating moment. Ten big minutes later, the artist picks up where he left off.
“I took each event fairly calmly, trying to tell myself ‘We’re going to deal with it,’ says Arnaud Tsamère a month later when discussing these serial inconveniences. Looking back on it, I tell myself that it’s quite symptomatic of this show and what it tells, of this restrained violence that I had to tame, accept and transform into artistic material. »
“I have always considered my career as a fall of dominoes”
Go back three years. The comic no longer has the heart to laugh. He must overcome his second divorce in four years and face the death of his father, swept away by a dazzling cancer. “I do not claim to have experienced something exceptional, but I experienced it in a very violent and very sad way”, says Arnaud Tsamère. During this period, he feels “empty”, has “no more desire to give anything to anyone”. He plans to definitely turn the page on humor. “I have always considered my career as a fall of dominoes. In 2019, the last of them fell. It seemed obvious to me that I had to find freshness and motivation in another activity,” he confides.
His colleague and friend Jérémy Ferrari thinks quite differently. “He gave me this slightly crazy bet to try this show by talking about everything, by putting in the spotlight everything that hurt me and wanted me to stop the scene”, sums up Arnaud Tsamère. His boyfriend finds the right words to convince him, even if putting down on paper everything that makes him waver seems like an Everest to climb. “He said to me, ‘Write. You’re funny, so don’t try to be.’ It’s very flattering and it took the pressure off me. I did not feel the obligation of anything, relates the comedian. He also advised me to write in chronological order, without thinking about a dramaturgical structure. It unblocked me. I enjoyed writing about it. »
The faithful of Tsamère will find in 2 weddings and 1 funeral absurd and burlesque sketches, specialties of the artist. But he also wanted to open up new horizons, “bring a deeper and personal touch”: “Anger is a register that I had not yet exploited to this point on stage. »
“I don’t want playing this show to be therapeutic”
Before concluding the interview, Arnaud Tsamère makes a point of emphasizing that he does not want pathos, that his only-on-stage does not fall into irrelevant melodrama. We reassure him and we confirm: we found it very funny. “I don’t want playing this show to be therapeutic,” he says. When writing, we had to dig up, bring out a lot of stuff. But on stage, it’s just fun. »
To the point of bringing out the game of dominoes and continuing this career he thought was over? It seems so. The artist says he found an enthusiasm on the boards that he had not felt for a very long time. “The real question, common to all depressives, is that of self-esteem. This show awakened in me an esteem that I had completely lost, he says. This has given rise to other desires, we have a three-way show project with Jérémy Ferrari and Baptiste Lecaplain. I will also go on stage for a theatrical project around Molière directed by Alain Sachs. “Two weddings, one funeral. And a rebirth.