The Central Laboratory1

A young girl came across as a gloomy, observant and tense “kid”, on the margins of family life, with an unpredictable, capricious and disturbing mother, a tender but rather unavailable father, and siblings for whom she was an enigma. Her melancholic withdrawal, the manifest symptom of her phobia, was inhibited speech. Silence was the mark of her presence which was sometimes ridiculed and sometimes neglected by others. She seemed neither to want nor expect anything from the world. Nevertheless, she accepted an invitation by her brothers and sisters to attend a theatrical production. Fascinated, she came into contact with the theatrical way of life in which words and roles are given. She projected herself into it, saw herself in it and saw in the manner of a revelation the place that she could have in it. The appeal was irresistible: she would go into theatre! How does one inhabit the stage? How does one exist in this space where only the specific magic of the place and of the theatrical phenomenon seemed to her to be able to offer the wished-for yet inconceivable metamorphosis of her nagging disquiet?

When she joined the theatre troupe, it was her name that turned out to be unpronounceable! She could not say who she was. She stumbled over each letter. The ordeal was infinitely painful, but not prohibitive: she was accepted. Initially, she was able to give herself with passion to her lifelong activity/passivity, that of a spectator, of a bulimic voyeur disengaged from the life of others. Then she had the opportunity to go on stage and to face the challenge of having to speak and render the text of the character that she was playing; which she did, but mechanically.

This was how Esther Kahn, a troubling character in the 2000 film of the same name by Arnaud Desplechin, makes her entrance upon the stage as in real life. Theatre is her “central laboratory”, which she invests in as a space and time that are conducive to learning and to experiences favoured by the existence o