Theater Festival - Two little ladies to the north

Some plays make you laugh. Some make you cry. And there are some rare, precious ones that do both at the same time - though we don't quite know how. The Théâtre de l'Inattendu presents one of them, written by Pierre Notte and directed by Éric Puche - a play that is tender and cruel, absurd and profoundly human.

Two sisters. Already battered by life, each in her own way. They reunite after the death of their mother - a moment we all dread, but which we always get through in the end. But instead of a dignified and solemn funeral, as decorum would demand, they make a different choice: to take the urn under their arm and leave. North. Without really knowing why. Perhaps because staying was impossible. Perhaps because moving is the only way they know to mourn.

What could have been a peaceful pilgrimage becomes a wild ride. On the road, everything comes up - grudges accumulated since childhood, little humiliations never digested, buried jealousies, family wounds thought to have healed but still bleeding at the slightest wrong word. They bicker, make up, scratch and claw each other. Each stage becomes both a battlefield and a playground.

That's Pierre Notte's genius: handling black humor with the precision of a surgeon. He brings out laughter where we least expect it - in the ashes of a mother who's too much of a nuisance, at the heart of arguments that turn poetic, in silences that speak louder than words. These two little ladies, as fierce as they are touching, as annoying as they are endearing, turn grief into explosive comedy and sorrow into laughter.

A journey that resembles life - clumsy, absurd, sometimes tragic. But terribly, irresistibly funny.