At the Avignon "off" Festival, "Une chose vraie", with Ysanis Padonou, leaves the audience petrified with emotion.

Stop everything and take the time to rethink what happened. Take a deep breath, let the seconds slip away before staggering back out into the street under the sun. Not because it intoxicates the body with its heat. But because a shock has just occurred in the cool of a theater. That's also what the Avignon Festival is all about. A series of shows that follow one another year after year, and then, suddenly, an artist appears who sweeps everything away in his path. Something, "a real thing," has broken with the ordinary.

Here is the picture: an audience petrified with emotion. A prostrate actress, her torso curled up in fetal mode after an hour and twenty minutes of a stunning, essential (certainly) and unforgettable (probably) performance. Communion, this grail invoked many times in the theater but which manifests itself so little there, this fantasized rallying point is the final, definitive and moving note of the monologue offered at the Train bleu: Une chose vraie .

The title should be taken literally. Sober, apoetic, and coldly neutral, it is factual. The exact opposite of the stormy perceptions provoked by the story (directed by Romain Gneouchev) brought to the stage by actress Ysanis Padonou. Her words and her way of telling them, her story and her way of playing it: nothing about this fabulous performer gives way to pathos.

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