Jean Lamouroux Entraigues (1933-2008): "jarry On The Hill" Costume Project, Pastel

Jean LAMOUROUX Entraigues-sur-la-Sorgue (1933-2008): "Jarry sur la butte" Costume project, pastel; Dimensions 47 x 30 cm When the Postmaster entered the dining room-living room to drink pastis, Jean, who was drawing, could not imagine what was going to happen. Seeing his drawing, the postmaster said to Eugène who had invited him: "Your son is very gifted! You should send him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Avignon!". A life as an artist? This was not what Eugène had envisaged, considering that he was the best in the class, despite the fact that Eugène had only granted him the Sunday morning class, he was awarded the prize for excellence. Still a young teenager, Jean could not think of the beautiful life he was going to have: travel, but also meeting prestigious people and the whole school of great figurative and abstract painters in New York. A rich life, far from the small village in Provence where he grew up, but also sometimes difficult; an artist's life, rich and unexpected. (Robert Lamouroux) In this play, Jean-Louis Barrault draws inspiration, as he had done a year earlier for François Rabelais, from the life and creations of Alfred Jarry. The prologue, partially taking up Ubu sur la Butte, also evokes the pataphysician Faustroll, the Ubu household, his gidouille, and different scenes from his work mixed with moments from the playwright's career. The first act is centered on "military stupidity", moving from life to fantasy, and from the barracks to the nightmare of the battle of Morsang, a battle imagined by Alfred Jarry and described in a chapter of the novel La Dragonne, as a heroic tale. After the intermission, this fusion between Alfred Jarry's life, in bulk, and his work continues with sporting and sexual challenges that obsessed this author4,5,6. Jean-Louis Barrault thus comments, for Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, on the theme of this play, alluding to these events of May 1968: "Jarry's illness is already the illness of our century. His drama is ours in advance: that, above all, of a part of the youth, the desertion through nostalgia for a certain ideal. Hence his anarchist aggressiveness against the institutions that tie us down, but also his tenderness. Jarry is the Friend, the Brother, who laughs so as not to make us despair and who dies thinking of us, who dies and who lives again for us"7.