It is in the beautiful red velvet setting of the Théâtre des Variétés that Bob Martet's offbeat comedy The Family and the Vegetable Garden is played with Marie-Anne Chazel and Régis Laspalès as headliners.
A surprising duo of bourgeois parents
As great bourgeois Marie-Anne Chazel and Régis Laspalès are very funny, the staging serves the often absurd humor of the play. We find them camping at home in the sofa bed of their huge apartment in Les Invalides and we even witness touching lines behind the comic façade. Because basically, these parents are the perfect illustration of the adage money does not make happiness, what they lack is a meaning to their lives.
And it is their son played by a remarkable Jean-Baptiste Shelmerdine in a rather unflattering role who will give them in spite of himself, through his girlfriend Chloé very corrosive interpreted by the fiery Juliette Allain. Let's say that failing to put their feet back on the ground, she put them in the vegetable garden…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOXYh7gA4y8
A second act as a movie set
Hats off to Anne Bourgeois directing and Emmanuelle Favre directing, it's so rare that we travel so visually to the theatre. So here we are in the forest and if Tom, the son of Marie and Denis was shy in act 1, he reveals qualities hidden in act two.
It's all the more interesting that they are not alone in the forest and that their little impromptu walk supposed to remain incognito gets tougher because another young woman gets in the way of their way, a story of mobile phone that puts the chip in the ear to this other activist who is waiting for her undocumented boyfriend who got lost in the forest. The energy of Emma Gamet in front of our trio of shock makes sparks. But Tom is getting better and better at shovel strokes…
Things always come in threes…
All's well that ends well, we think, at least for Marie, Denis and Tom back in their large apartment where the paintings of Denis' aquatic period proudly sit. Marie, now a cordon bleu, prepares the soup kitchen for migrants. Denis will leave for a training as a farm worker…
And then the police ring. Caroline Maillard funny at will with her accent and her game gives cold sweats to the trio who swim a breaststroke cast in front of her questions, under the impassive gaze of frogs.
If the end is a little expected, it could not be otherwise…
You will certainly love this play where the actors are excellent if you like: the offbeat humor, the classy boulevards (beautiful costumes too), the contemporary winks diverted with lightness and… frogs of course. People who do not like the second, third and even eighth degree abstain!
Notes: The family and the vegetable garden
Wednesday to Friday at 8:30 pm
Saturday 5pm and 8.30pm
Sunday 4:30 pm
Written by Marie
