Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan cross the spirit of the Monty Python and the Burlesque of Clowns in their “Cabaret de Carton”, created in 2020. To see on the subsidized stages of province and in the Tristan Bernard theater, in Paris .
by Sandrine Blanchard (Maubeuge (North), Special Envoy)
Large patina, it is a theatrical adventure as crazy as its title, a incredible creation of a cardboard cabaret which – let us dare the play on words because it is essential – is a hit everywhere in France. Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan, the creators and performers of this hilarious epic, crossing the spirit of the Monty Python and the Burlesque of the Clowns, could never have imagined that their forty minutes of improvisation, a day of September 2020 on An outdoor tank, at the rear of the Rond-Point Theater in Paris, are transformed into a cartoony show for all public demanded everywhere in France.
Rewarded in 2022 by the Molière of the Public Theater, the big patina already combines more than one hundred and forty dates of touring in subsidized theaters and 180 performances at the Tristan Bernard theater, a private Parisian theater. This summer, they will be at the Edinburgh Festival, in Scotland, and, for the 2023-2024 season, 175 dates are already planned, including three weeks at the Théâtre des Célestins, in Lyon. Behind this impressive calendar, which required recruiting three new pairs to play at the same time in Paris and in the provinces, hide an unusual story, a long complicity and an unshakable faith in a theater accessible to all.
“This spectacle is a child of the covid”, tell Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan. It all starts in 2020, in a rehearsal room for northern puffs in Paris. “We had to set up a project, we didn’t really have any idea, and the theater no longer had a penny,” they remember. Faced with the absence of means, they began to write words on boxes, “quail”, “rock”, “tree” …
epic situations
At the same time, Jean-Michel Ribes, then boss of the Théâtre du Rond-Point, contacted this duo whom he knows well to offer them to participate, in September 2020, in a small outdoor festival, the Rond- Point in the garden, imagined to revive the desire for spectacle after a season very disturbed by the health crisis. The two actors accept, delighted with the idea of playing outdoors to reach as much audience as possible. And find a title, the big patina, echoing the history of the roundabout, which was a ice rink before being transformed into the theater. “It only remained to have the big one skate,” laughs Pierre Guillois, with a physique as lean as that of his partner is corpulent.
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