“La Relève”. Each month, “Le Monde Campus” meets a young person who shakes up standards. At 30, the actress Séphora Pondi has just joined the Comédie-Française, where she is playing the “King Lear” and will play at the end of the season the title role of “Medea”.
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Who has already seen her play will recognize her in a second. Séphora Pondi welcomes us with the joy and vitality that characterize it on stage. It must be said that the actress – and she does not hide it – is not completely descended from her wonder. At 30, she has just entered the Comédie-Française as a new resident. She receives in her lodge with a Studette. Almost 13 square meters just for her, where large windows overlook the excitement of the neighborhood. “If I had been told that, in my intermittent life of the show, I will work in such conditions and will one day be pampered like that …!”, Affairs still Séphora Pondi.
Within the institution, integrated at the end of 2021, the young woman tasted the classical repertoire daily by which she came to the theater. She, which is nevertheless come, as she says, from an environment “far from majority culture”, that of a paved middle class. With a striking energy on stage, Séphora Pondi first revealed in roles of rebellious women. Remarkable – and noticed – in Disobéir, which she played barely out of school, in 2017, under the direction of Julie Berès, then in Au Bois, a modern red chaperon at the National Theater of La Colline, in Paris.
Nothing surprising, then, that she takes on the role of Kent today in King Lear, Shakespeare, a flagship of the start of the comedy-French comedy, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Closer to the sovereign – played by Denis Podalydès -, the character is chased from the kingdom “for having dared to tell the truth before power”, comments Séphora Pondi, sitting on the sofa of his lodge. Very close to her, the text of Médée, of which she begins the reading sessions with the team. The actress will hold, at the end of the season, the title role of the merciless magician in this tragedy of Euripides.
“Thirst for expression”
For a long time, the young woman sought to conquer a space to deploy her voice. Séphora Pondi grows in “all the popular suburbs of Paris, or almost”, she says, with her parents, Cameroonian immigrants, management and accounting teachers in vocational high school. In his family, we don’t go to the theater. “But my father was someone who had a taste for the show. He was very charismatic, extroverted. My mother was very flirtatious, always with a certain melancholy. All my childhood, I had the impression of Living tragedies of squires, while I lived in HLM, “she laughs. Gladly theatrical, the paternal figure is, at home, rather authoritarian, sometimes threatening.
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