Un vivant qui passe

By

Claude Lanzmann

Direction

Éric Didry

Performed by

Nicolas Bouchaud et Frédéric Noaille

Based on the eponymous work of Claude Lanzmann
A project of Nicolas Bouchaud
Directed by Éric Didry
Artistic collaboration Véronique Timsit

Nicolas Bouchaud adapts Claude Lanzmann’s film interview on Nazi brutality Un vivant qui passe for the stage, with a deeply-held belief in the unique closeness that theatre fosters with the work it interprets.

What is seeing? How do we abdicate responsibility and sell our souls on the road to blindness? In Un vivant qui passe, a film released in 1997, Claude Lanzmann interviews Maurice Rossel, a delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross during the Second World War. This Swiss doctor, with the full consent of the Nazi authorities, inspected the camps of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, yet was unwilling to see the death machine that lurked behind the falsehoods presented by the Germans for his visit. “Rossel embodies something that lies in wait around every corner throughout our lives”, says Nicolas Bouchaud. “Casual racism, latent antisemitism. Hatred of the other, whether racial, economic, or cultural.” The actor devised this theatre adaptation with a desire to create a portrayal of the Holocaust which is more than an act of remembrance: a different way of passing on the knowledge of these events, with gestures which, like the performance itself, unfold in the here and now.