MONOLOGUE WITH A MAN IN THE SHADOWS (excerpt)

Monologue with a Man in the Shadows initially presents itself as a story of love and waiting, but gradually reveals itself to be something much broader: a reflection on memory, consciousness, desire, artistic creation, theatre, and above all, on the vertiginous question of what is real.

What immediately stands out is that the play never tells a story in a linear way. It proceeds through fragments, flashes, memories, conversations, poems, videos, silences, and repetitions. It therefore resembles less the narrative of a relationship than the way a relationship exists within consciousness: in fragments, through images, sensations, objects, recurring phrases, and things that can never quite be reconstructed. From the very first sequence, the man declares: “I was born this morning.” This birth is not merely that of a character: it is the birth of a being who appears under the spectator’s gaze. He has no memory of the previous day; he discovers his breath, his body, his existence, and almost simultaneously discovers the audience. The play thus establishes a fundamental equivalence between birth, consciousness, and theatre. To be on stage is to become conscious of existing under another’s gaze. Later, the woman experiences exactly the same birth in the video: “I am the woman. I was born tonight.” The man and the woman are therefore literally created by the performance. They do not simply exist before entering the stage to tell their story: they exist because a performance brings them into being. Theatre thus becomes a machine for producing consciousness.

This idea is immediately extended through the role given to the spectator. The spectator is never simply seated in their chair, watching a story unfold independently of them. From the beginning, the man asks them to listen to his breathing, then to their own, then to that of the others. The performance seeks to create a temporary community between the actor and those watching him. The darkened auditorium thus becomes a paradoxical place: each person is alone with their thoughts, yet that solitude is shared. This is precisely what the play then explores through the theme of solitude.

The man dreams of a house in the countryside where he could paint, write, read, cook, observe the flowers, listen to the silence, and be alone without suffering from that solitude. Chosen solitude is presented as a form of freedom, whereas solitude among other people becomes a form of suffering that we try to fill with objects, distractions, or artificial constructions. Theatre itself exists between these two states: the spectator is physically surrounded by other people, yet is invited to retreat into their own thoughts. The auditorium thus becomes a kind of collective inner house.

Love forms the emotional heart of the play, but it is never presented as something simple or stable. One of its most important ideas is that we never truly encounter another person without projecting something of ourselves onto them. “Love is nothing but a lie. You are my illusion.” This sentence might seem to reduce love to an illusion; in reality, it says something far more subtle. The beloved person does exist, but the person we love is never exactly the real person: they are also the image we construct of them, nourished by our desires, our past, our memories, and our expectations.

The other is real, and yet remains beyond our grasp. They are “there”, but they are never entirely “ours”. It is this impossibility of completely possessing the other that makes love both painful and fertile. The man thus becomes a nomad in the “Sahara” of the beloved woman, moving among the mirages and oases of desire, tenderness, and memory. He knows that others have passed through her life before him and that others will come after him. Love is therefore not a territory that can be conquered once and for all: it is a landscape one crosses.

This conception of love is directly connected to that of memory. The people we have loved become “sketches” of the people we are subsequently capable of loving. Every relationship leaves a shape within us. Every story contributes to our construction, as though an invisible sculptor were shaping us through our encounters. The play therefore rejects the idea that past loves are simply mistakes or stages to be erased. Even when they are over, they continue to inhabit the present. They become fragments of consciousness. This is why memory is both precious and painful: it preserves what no longer exists. The past becomes a paradoxical presence. It is absent from the real world, yet present within consciousness.

The green sweater materialises this idea beautifully. It might seem to be nothing more than an incidental detail, but it returns several times and eventually becomes a true relic-object.

“You don’t have that green sweater you used to have anymore?”

The question returns, then changes:

“You really don’t have it anymore?”

“What did you do with it?”

The garment becomes the silent repository of a story. We do not know exactly where it is, but it is precisely this absence that gives it its power. It represents what remains when the person is no longer there: a material trace, something that might be ordinary to anyone else but becomes charged with immense value for the person who remembers. The green sweater is almost the material equivalent of theatre itself: an apparently humble object capable of containing an entire invisible world.

This is also what the woman does with her letters. The great sequence of the Letters from the Crusades forms the emotional and literary centre of the play. Separation transforms lived love into writing. Absence creates the need to speak to someone who is no longer there. The woman therefore writes to the man who has left, even though she does not know whether he will ever read these letters. She refuses to let the man become a ghost in her life. This phrase is essential: to write is to prevent erasure.

But writing does not merely preserve memory; it transforms it. Intimate experience becomes a work. Lived love becomes poetic material, then Le Pénétré, and finally a performance. In other words, disappearance produces creation. What can no longer be lived directly can still be written, represented, and transmitted.

This is probably one of the most beautiful movements in the play: it shows how one can “make art out of what disappears”. Lost love is not recovered, but neither is it entirely lost. It changes form. It passes from body to memory, from memory to letter, from letter to poem, from poem to theatre. Artistic creation thus becomes a way of resisting erasure without pretending to abolish loss. Art does not resurrect what has disappeared; it gives it another existence.

Le Pénétré represents the culmination of this transformation. The word itself is deliberately ambiguous, both physical and spiritual. It refers to the body, desire, intimate experience, but also to the experience of being traversed by something. To be “penetrated”, in the broadest sense, is to be deeply affected by an experience, a person, a memory, an emotion, or a work. Lived love therefore passes through the body and then into writing. It becomes artistic material.

The resulting text is deliberately excessive, violent, mystical, erotic, and at times almost mythological. This excess corresponds to the way a loving memory can become larger than the original event. Memory does not reproduce reality: it transforms it.

The play constantly works on this transformation of reality into fiction. It then raises an essential question: if something has been lived, then told, rewritten, and performed, at what point does it cease to be true?

The play’s answer is paradoxical: perhaps it never does.

This is precisely where the sentence becomes so important:

“It’s all a lie! Everything is a lie. Only theatre is truth because it is a lie that does not disguise itself.”

This formula can be considered the dramaturgical key to the work. Theatre does not pretend to be reality. It exposes its artifices: the lights, the videos, the stage manager, the text, the author, the actors, the changes in lighting, the entrances and exits. But because it exposes its lie, it can paradoxically reach a form of truth. Theatre does not say, “this happened exactly like this.” Rather, it says, “this is a representation, but what you feel in response to this representation is real.”

This is why the metatheatrical rupture of the twelfth sequence is so important. The man reveals to the audience that he is reading a text, that the author wrote what he is saying, that the stage manager controls the lighting and videos, and that everything is happening in darkness. He temporarily destroys the theatrical illusion. But destroying the illusion does not destroy the performance: it becomes the performance.

The play exposes its own mechanisms and transforms them into dramaturgical material. The spectator can no longer forget that they are watching theatre, and yet they remain caught up in the story. This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the work: artifice does not prevent emotion; it can even make emotion more conscious.

The title itself participates in this strategy. Monologue with a Man in the Shadows announces a monologue, and therefore a solitary voice, whereas the work constantly brings another presence into view. Eventually, the woman says that this is what the play is called, and the man replies: “That’s a lie! It’s a dialogue!”

The woman corrects herself again: “It’s a dialogue with video.”

The title is therefore deliberately misleading. The announced monologue becomes a dialogue. And this passage from monologue to dialogue corresponds to the deeper evolution of the play: at the beginning, each character seems separated, enclosed within their own consciousness; at the end, the two characters are reunited and hold hands. The entire dramaturgy therefore tells the story of a passage from solitude to relationship.

The “man in the shadows” is also a particularly rich figure because he can never be reduced to a single identity. He may be the real lover, the memory of the lover, the woman’s invented character, the actor playing this man, the man she still desires, or simply a representation of the Other that each of us carries within ourselves. His darkness is not merely a question of lighting: it symbolises his impossibility of ever being fully known. We may love someone, remember them, write about them, dream of them, but we can never gain complete access to their inner life. The other always remains, at least partly, in the shadows.

This impossibility is reinforced by the motif of waiting. The play is literally permeated by waiting: waiting for a man, waiting for an answer, waiting for a meeting, waiting for a video, waiting for the lights to return, waiting for the next sequence, waiting for the end of the performance. At one point, when asked, “What do we do?”, the answer is simply: “We wait.”

The spectator is waiting too. They are waiting for something to happen. The play therefore turns waiting into a concrete theatrical experience. Time even becomes physically perceptible in the sequence where the man and woman count out a minute through the sound of “tick-tocks”. Time is no longer merely the framework of the story: it becomes the very material of the performance.

This waiting is also connected to boredom. The woman sometimes asks for a video to be played because she is bored; she becomes impatient, almost provoking the stage manager. Boredom then becomes an openly acknowledged theatrical experience. Can a performance allow a spectator to become bored? Can we accept doing nothing, thinking, remaining in silence? The play seems to answer yes. It even asks the spectator to “take a measured pleasure in being bored”.

Boredom becomes a doorway into thought. In a society constantly seeking to fill every empty space, the play claims the right to emptiness.

Emptiness and darkness play precisely this role.

“Nothing on stage.”

The phrase returns like a kind of manifesto. There is almost no set, almost no object. Yet this emptiness allows words, bodies, images, and thoughts to appear. Darkness is not the absence of performance: it is the condition for its appearance. In darkness, the voice becomes visible in another way. The spectator can no longer see the body, but hears a presence. The empty stage becomes a mental space.

The videos, meanwhile, seem to belong to another region of consciousness. They function like memories, dreams, or mental images. The abandoned houses, the cherry trees, the filmed encounters, the green sweater, the beating heart, the woman appearing directly to camera: all of these seem less like realistic narrative than fragments of memory. The degraded film, dying batteries, and disappearing images remind us that even material traces are destined to fade. Memory itself is not eternal. It deteriorates, like film stock.

The cherry tree then becomes a particularly powerful image. It returns several times in the videos, associated with spring, time, love, and ultimately the possibility of a meeting. The final video shows the woman leaving a house while the man waits beneath the cherry tree. But the play refuses to tell us whether this meeting actually takes place. Is it a memory? A dream? A projection? A future scene? A theatrical invention? Ultimately, it does not matter. The image possesses emotional truth without requiring factual truth.

Once again, this is the logic of theatre: something may not be real and yet may be profoundly true.

This ambiguity is reinforced by the motifs of the butterfly, the wheel, and the die. The butterfly represents metamorphosis, the passage from one state to another; the wheel represents movement, repetition, and return; the die represents chance and uncertainty. Together, they suggest a conception of destiny that refuses simple explanations.

Destiny is neither entirely written nor entirely left to chance. It is constructed through a mysterious combination of choices, encounters, circumstances, and transformations.

“As long as there is the die, as long as there is the wheel, there will be destiny.”

The character therefore cannot know in advance what will happen. They can only move forward.

The question of belief extends this reflection. “Do you believe?” the woman asks. The man answers that he does not know. She points out that if he truly believed, he would not need to think about it. Yet the play never definitively chooses between belief and disbelief. It prefers doubt.

And the woman says so explicitly:

“One must doubt. It is good to doubt. Keep doubting.”

Doubt becomes almost an ethic of the work. To doubt is not to know nothing; it is to accept that reality cannot be confined within a definitive explanation.

The play gradually expands individual love into something much broader. “What is it about? — Love!” Everything becomes love: the other person, parents, children, war, jealousy. Indifference, by contrast, is described as a “no man’s land”, an almost empty territory between love and hatred.

This means that love is not merely romantic feeling. It designates, more broadly, whatever connects us to the world. To love is to be affected. It is to be traversed. This is precisely what Le Pénétré also means.

The end of the play then brings all these threads together. After fragmenting the story, separating the voices, multiplying videos, silences, memories, lies, and doubts, the two characters finally appear together in the half-light. They move forward, take each other by the hand, and bow.

The gesture is extremely simple, almost bare after the excess of the preceding texts. Yet it may constitute the answer to the entire play.

After searching for truth in memory, love, destiny, language, theatre, and writing, what remains is contact with the other.

The play therefore begins with a solitary birth and ends with a relationship. It begins with “I” and reaches “we”, even if this “we” remains fragile and ambiguous. It begins in darkness and ends in a light that finally allows us to see the two bodies together. It begins with a man asking the spectator to listen to his breathing and ends with two beings holding hands.

Between the two, everything has been traversed: love, desire, separation, memory, creation, doubt, time, death, and theatre.

Ultimately, Monologue with a Man in the Shadows may not be trying to answer the question of whether the man returns, whether the woman has found her love again, whether the letters recount exactly what happened, or whether the images are real.

It asks a deeper question: what do we do with what eludes us?

The answer offered by the play is beautiful precisely because it is neither possession nor forgetting. We love, we lose, we wait, we remember, we write, we transform. We turn absence into speech, speech into a work, and the work into a new presence.

Perhaps this is why the play resonates so strongly: it does not pretend to repair disappearance. It accepts that the other will always remain partly in the shadows. But it shows that this very impossibility can become a source of desire, thought, and creation.

Theatre then appears as the ideal place for this: a place where we know that everything is false, where we see the artifices, where we know that the characters exist only for the duration of the performance, and where nevertheless, for a few moments, something profoundly true can happen.

The performance thus becomes a shared experience of this paradoxical truth: something can be invented and still affect us as something real.

And when the two characters finally take each other by the hand, this is not necessarily the resolution of their love story. It may be something more essential: after everything that has been said about absence, memory, and illusion, theatre finally allows them to be together, here and now.

The present moment becomes their only certainty.

The play does not promise that love will last, that destiny will bring them together, or that memory will preserve them. It simply offers them this encounter.

And perhaps this is its final truth: we cannot hold on to the other, stop time, or prevent disappearance; but we can still meet, create, speak, look, and be present to one another.