After the sudden death of comedian Guillaume Bats, the Théâtre Le Paris launched a call for applications to offer its room for the time of the Avignon festival to a young talent to replace him.
“Leaving a void in the programming of Paris would be adding a void to the void that Guillaume will leave behind him and that does not make much sense,” wrote the director of the establishment Grégory Cometti, on Facebook.
“I doubt he would have wanted a closed room”
“We will simply offer the room for the entire duration of the Festival on the slot that Guillaume was to occupy” to a “young comedian still unknown” because “I very much doubt that he would have wanted, instead of his show, a closed room so deserted and that the laughter is silent there between 7:40 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Guillaume Bats, suffering from brittle bone disease, died at the age of 36 in early June. He was on tour for his new show “Inchallah” and was to perform from July 7 to 29 at the Off d’Avignon festival, one of the major theater events in France with the “In”.
A quality show
“The only limit to our initiative will be to find a quality show that can defend itself among the 1,650 shows that will be present in Avignon in July. The idea is not to send an artist to hell,” concludes Grégory Cometti.
Born in Reims in 1987, Guillaume Bats had revealed a difficult life course: abandoned by his mother before his first birthday, he had spent a large part of his childhood between an orphanage and foster families.