K Samka

Composed just after WWII, Premier Amour (First Love) wasn’t published before 1970. Jean-Quentin Châtelain and Jean-Michel Meyer, appealed by the jubilant and humorous writing of this address to the reader, created the show in 1999. In Avignon both the director and the actor will meet up with Premier Amour again…

Premier Amour in one of the first texts that Becket wrote directly in French. Here the author plays with the different levels of the language and toys with its strangeness. It’s not a play but more of a short novel written in the first person, greatly autographical (the place of two meetings: the encounter of the narrator with a woman on a bench, while he is wandering, homeless, after his father’s death, as well as the loving encounter Becket has with the language he will write most of his works in).

At the moment of the creation, Jérôme Lindon, director of Les Editions de Minuit (publisher) and executor of Samuel Becket, had required: « No music, no stage set, no gesticulation!!! » and nearness suits to the director and the actor… There are only tow props on the stage: an antique office chair that, when swivelling, sounds like a cello, and an old hat.
Jean-Michel Meyer

Production / Co-production