Interview with Lucie Bonnefoy Cudraz and Romane Journeau

Romane sends me a photo of the cafe’s exterior to help me find it which is very useful as the street is too busy for me to have my head buried in google maps. We sat outside, under a leafy tree. We are surrounded by other diners and by the spruiking troupes of artists promoting their shows. It is a soundscape of percussion instruments, singing and the wind rifling through flyers. It is a lively backdrop for a conversation about their play, ‘ROMÉO ET JULIETTE ou l’énergie désespoir’. The impassioned pitches of theatre makers to potential audience members mirrors the passion that buzzes around Romane and Lucie as they discuss the process of bringing this show to life.

Ellen: Can you introduce yourselves and tell me about your work?

Romane: We are Lucie and Romane;

Lucie: I perform and I am the director and we work… 

Romane: In this play and everything else about our art, we do everything. Lucie is the beginning. Because she has the first…idea.

Lucie: Energy.

Romane: Energy. So for this play she thinks about Romeo and Juliette and how she wants to play, write. Then we work. She dances, and we think about how we can light the set. In fact we do everything because we begin so it’s important for us to touch everything for control. A little bit because this is very, very hard…. I love the world, it’s a very hard (Romane knocks on the table) texture and the play, the theatre. So Lucie is involved because she takes the responsibility and the first move. And she has the ability to bring people into the project and take care of everyone in the beginning and after that I help her make some connections and expand the work. Lucie came to here, to Avignon and she-

Lucie: Yes I lived there for two years.

Ellen: Here in Avignon, before the festival?

Lucie: Yeah, I like the festival and I know the festival and I dream about this festival. And I wanted to do that for us. 

Romane: She’s very passionate.

Lucie: Yeah, it’s a fucking passion and I like to show our work because…. The desperate energy…

Romane: We are desperate, we have the last energy and the biggest heart-

Lucie: We don’t have the choice to..to..

Romane: To create.. To chase our goal. And we have the last energy, the last power, the last part of us. 

Lucie: It’s not possible for us to have… l’échec.

Ellen: To have? 

Romane: A failure. 

(échec = failure, defeat, setback)

Ellen: Wow.

Romane: We can’t fail. 

Ellen: (Laughing) Wow. 

Romane: It’s a little bit, not healthy for us.

Lucie: No! I dont have the mental health! 

(Laughter)

Lucie: I don’t have that.

Romane: We are kind of crazy, we are so crazy.

Lucie: Because we are just two girls and it’s really hard to create and be the director of a project-

Lucie: When you are young-

Romane: When you are a girl…we came from a school and we didn’t like it. We have a lot of struggle to be a part of the school because she has a special energy and is very passionate. So everytime something is different it's hard to be a part of something and in the school, we were in the same class and the energy was very different. It was very difficult for us to continue artistically because people want us to just be pretty. It was very subtle. But they don't expect us to talk about our condition. It’s difficult for everyone and they say, ‘it’s art’ so you have to deal with it and be  a part of something so don't be too much.

Lucie: But we are too much.

Romane: So I have to hide my too much and Lucie, she didn't want to because she is too passionate. She has done so much outside (the school environment); a group with music, she performs, she dances, she writes anything and at this time I was at the same school and I tried to be a part of something I didn’t like and I didn’t realise (at the time) and Lucie creates and goes in the underground movement.

Lucie: Yeah! With the techno group and I do drag performance and queer performance and I’m engaged (culturally).

Romane: She is engaged.

Lucie: I know the queer scene and it was like, okay, there is a different way and I dont care about anything (in reference to the culture within the institution they attended).

Romane: And you’re not too much. 

Lucie: I’m not too much, I’m different. So-

Romane: We create Romeo and Juliette.

Lucie: I created Romeo and Juliette for the end of studies with other students…

Romane: What do I say for people who don’t…who exclude?

Lucie: Black sheep?

Ellen: In this scenario, you’re the black sheep? 

Lucie: Yeah, I want to create Romeo and Juliette with other black sheep from school.

This ‘too much’ feeling underpins the desire to adapt the Shakespearean classic. This approach to making theatre is born from Lucie’s life and feeling. Roméo and Juliette is a queer adaptation that captures the essence of teenage desperation against the absurd adult world that values maintaining reputation and tradition over life. The family feud is viewed as being fuelled by capitalistic competition and the piece plays with conflict and collateral violence by creating a meta-theatrical breakdown of the show and with an omni-present character portrayed by Lucie… who alongside providing the play for all additional characters in the original Shakespearean text, represents the spirit of story and theatre itself. La Mauvaise Herbe have created a form that holds the ideas within the adaptation while also representing their process to theatre making: that reality inspires and is ultimately absurd. 

Lucie and Romane tell me about how the show has changed throughout the development. Before ‘the explosion’ the work was an adaptation, but as the creators dealt with the fallout, the play took on a new flavour. As many artists have reckoned with burnout and constant cancellation fatigue throughout the pandemic, this show had its own crisis.Having artists leave a project and managing it while working draws upon energy resources that further perpetuated l’energie desespoir. 

Romane: In 2019 you started with another group but there is confinement and covid.

Lucie: My Romeo went through depression and my Juliette left with my lighting director and I was like okay, fuck. There was my best friend and the lighting director who was the guy who makes the sound from my techno group and I was like… in two months I have to do a show. Fuck, what am I going to do? 

Romane: They are your world outside your school, your safe space, your family. Betrayed you. With good reason for one, it’s good for him. 

Lucie: He needs to take care of him. 

Romane: By the time I came, Lucie was just like…

Lucie: Empty.

Romane: Empty- like that. 

(Lucie has her thumb and forefinger pressed on either side of her nose and her brow furrowed)

Lucie: All my work is an explosion. 

Romane: And it was complicated because at this time the school was a failure for Lucie. But Romeo and Juliette has got to be the revenge of Lucie. But the explosion in this situation was really difficult for us, for her. 

Ellen: (To Romane) When did you join the project?

Romane: And at this time we met and I… in fact I saw the explosion because we had contact just before so I saw it when everything exploded, she was on vacation.

Lucie: Vacation for the first time in two years and all my friends say, "we move. We move on, you’re too toxic for us, you’re too passionate and we want to live our life so it's too much for us. You’re toxic, you’re problematic", and I was like, “just I work. I’m sorry, but just I work”. 

Romane: Lucie is completely independent, so she has to work at the restauration so people think she is… (To Lucie) At this time people say you're toxic but you’re not toxic I swear, people say that because she was so passionate but compressed in something because she has to work.

Ellen: This is to make money to live?

Lucie: This is to make money to live but also make money to make this work… so maybe we can live with this work. 

There is a palpable feeling of passion, determination and spirit about this project. A persistence through the feelings of impossibility. After re-developing the work, there was another disruption. 

Lucie: We don’t have the last moment before that Roméo and Juliette, I broke up with my girlfriend who did Roméo in the last one and Juliette didn't want to do it.

Romane: She was a little bit not well.

Lucie: Stressed. By theatre in general. So she said, I can’t continue.

Romane: She said it’s too difficult, the theatre is too hard for us. Nobody wants to hear us, it was too complicated so she left.

Lucie: Which was good for her.

They took a break from the development but support for the show came in an unlikely way, with Lucie and Romane’s work being recognised by an artist company who could offer development support and rehearsal space for a season at the Festival OFF in Avignon. One night they are at a bar and start discussing a completely new idea. The waitress asks them what they do and upon telling her they’re artists, they are introduced to the arts company, also at the bar, who are looking for young theatre companies to support. Lucie follows the impulse to pitch the idea they had in passing. They are asked to submit a proposal and so they go home that night to work on it, bottle of gin in hand. 

Romane: We poured all the anger out of ourselves. It was really…

Lucie: Rage! Rage! Rage!  Rage! Rage! 

Romane: Pure rage and the rage about the society, the rage about the politics, the rage about the men.

Lucie: Our conditions.

Romane: The rage about everything; the creator, the female creator who would say, ‘there is no problem!’. Like oh my god, we have so much rage inside our little bodies.

Lucie: It’s really not okay… Politicalment.. It’s like uh..

Romane: It’s not good to see… I guess it was just a scream. Of rage. 

Lucie: It’s really… trash .

Romane: We had to.. A little bit.

Lucie: Trash! Super trash!

Romane: We had to…

Ellen: Shape it? 

Romane: To shape it. 

Ellen: And this project wasn’t Romeo and Juliette?

Romane: We took a break from the development for Romeo and Juliette and this project gave us the opportunity to do this festival with this one. That’s why we talk about this. Because this project, with all our anger, gave us the opportunity to do the festival with someone. 

Interested in their work, they were offered support. I asked how this made them feel, in comparison to feeling alone in their passion and Romane says, “amazing”. While the product of the night they spent writing might be “not good to see”, this story paints an evocative picture, a scream of expression,  of their pathological desire to create. The play itself features engaging monologues from characters in different theatrical worlds, with different audiences and modes of expression, all driven with passion. I found this intensity of spirit combined with the structure and absurdist elements fascinating to watch. The framework of the play leads each character to become somewhat isolated from each other in their desires as the theatrical logic breaks down. I was impressed by the conviction and ability of the ensemble to communicate their characters desires and hold multiple theatrical worlds open for the audience to dip in and out of. Romane’s character within the piece and Romane as an artist speaks to what fuels this pathological desire to create and to persist in doing so despite challenge, setback and fatigue. 

Lucie: She plays the role of director in Romeo and Juliette and she has a monologue about…

Romane: I say, do you think it’s funny to suck the ass of people who suck ass for some tiny pieces of opportunities. I don’t like it. And I do this because I need theatre and I don’t want to be a part of… I need theatre. I need it to express myself and I don’t do it just for my pleasure. 

There is an undeniable joy and effortlessness to the production. A theatrical world is built with style and an eye for detail in having the cast hold the theatricality of the space, instigating sound and lighting cues through action. As the boundaries between stage, seating, actor, audience, psychologically true and magically fantastic blur, this staging breaks down and causes me to question why it was so important to begin with. My favourite moments included the whole ensemble on stage, connecting with the audience while driven by different theatrical conventions. Where they are placed within and outside of the lighting and boundaries make the audience titter. 

When asked about what influences them, the conversation turned towards a theme of self-examination. Romane and Lucie tell me a story about working the same job and making poké bowls together. Every shift was spent bouncing ideas around and they mentioned needing to separate work and life boundaries, during this time they worked constantly on Romeo and Juliette and it bled into all of their interactions. 

Ellen: I love the story about working constantly on the show while making poké bowls…. So I want to ask how your life interacts with your art?

Lucie: It's a diary. (The art) It’s an intimate diary. 

Romane: We didn’t think it would be a diary, but it just became. 

Lucie: We take some distance with our work because we’re so fucked up that we…

Romane: We distort. 

Lucie: We have fun about ourselves.

Romane: We all have something bad inside of us. (Romane makes a gesture  pressing her finger into the skin on her arm) We have good things and bad things and we laugh a lot about our bad things. 

Ellen: You said you were interested in the shades… in the shadows of people?

Romane: Exactly. 

Ellen: The darkness. 

Lucie: But we have fun about that ! (Lucie gestures towards Romane with a wiggling finger) Ha ha, you’re too sensitive ! 

(Romane joins in the play)

Romane: Okay, can you stop laughing?! Can you stop it?

(Laughter)

Romane: And that’s very funny because just the interaction between us it’s like a play sometimes we really…

Lucie: Play with disputes.

Romane: Sometimes we’re really mad at each other but in the… I don’t know, but in the fight we’ll say, “oh my god, that’s so funny” we have to use it! And after that it’s “okay… maybe we should talk about this later”… “Okay,  perfect, let's write”.

But if the work is becoming ‘trop sombre’ Lucie says they need to ‘bring more absurd’.

Ellen: What techniques do you use to inject absurdity into your work? 

Lucie: When you are bad and true, we have fun about that. And I think that when there is some challenge, there are always absurd things. In my life, always. 

Romane: Yes, yes. When we… not us, people, when people are mad they say some shit and it’s like, what the fuck. That’s nonsense, we don’t have to talk about this. Why do you talk about that now? It’s nonsense, they make some weird twist of an experience and that’s absurd. When people are mad, they do some things that are…

Lucie: Absurd.

Romane: Nonsense.

Lucie: Imagine we fight together and I stand up and just go (Lucie gestures down the street) Where? Where? Do you see the man with the blue shirt, far away? Imagine we fight and it’s not impossible, just absurd that you walk over to him and stand there and start to scream, ‘You piece of shit!!... I love you!’ it’s just possible and it’s the things that we love in the absurd world. 

Romane: And so, everything is just funny when you take it that way. In fact, (Romane clarifies an idea by telling it to Lucie in French first) In the absurd theatre, the thing we love and we think is very important to talk about it’s when we are absurd, we are true. Because we don’t control. We like control, but in the absurd we don’t control things and that’s really our point; to touch the true and concrete things, the real shit of humans. 

As Romane and Lucie tell me, and as I saw in the production, they love to play with the ‘malaise’. With the awkward.

Lucie: The public, they will rire. 

Romane: They will laugh. About a situation that is really fucked up. What do we say when we’re uncomfortable? Some people laugh. We are those people. Laugh about the uncomfortable. 

Lucie tells a story about her grandparents funeral. 

Lucie: Not fun, and really dark. For example, there are two deaths… 

Romane: Then the waitress says, “oh there’s two, this is too much for me.”

The funeral was a procession of bizarre happenings such as ‘ils sont tromper’ when Lucie’s grandparents were in the wrong clothes, all during a time of grief and high emotion.

Lucie: It’s just too weird! It’s a dark comedy! It’s not possible, it’s not possible! It’s just too weird! She was really sad but it was just too funny. And there were my parents, their parents have died and-

Romane: That’s why we say we never, never stopped working. Because the reality inspires. 

Lucie: The reality is more like the absurd, and it shows. 

Romane: That’s why people say the theatre is life, the life is theatre and it’s just like that.  

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