Promising author Axel Auriant signs his first novel "Rue de la Gaîté" in Ramatuelle

The feeling of diving into a Truffaut film, page by page. Baptiste, the main character, takes on the features of Jean-Pierre Léaud through the words.

"You're more effective than my shrink! (he laughs) I love Jean-Pierre Léaud so much. I was talking about him two days ago: I would dream of being a director's Jean-Pierre Léaud."

With Rue de la Gaîté , the young actor Axel Auriant (27 years old!) has written a first novel of great sensitivity, where reality mixes with fiction... Where the author puts, with humor and gravity, the right words on the ills.

He, the actor who built himself "through the initiatory stories that I encountered on my path. I really understood the power, the notion of representation and literature appeared in my logic of construction", to the point of feeling the desire to write what he would have liked to read.

And Rue de la Gaîté is here. The story of Baptiste, a young apprentice actor struggling with his anxieties. Those of childhood that haunt his young adult life. Ghosts as so many obstacles to prevent him from moving forward. Baptiste who, from his Florent class to the wings of the Montparnasse theater, will look behind the scenes of his set... To go through the looking glass and find, finally, the right place to stand. Where, ultimately, everything begins. Really.

He'll need a mentor for that. We can see Michel Bouquet in Marcel André's features. "There's a hint of Jean Marais in there too," the author confides. "But Michel Bouquet, it's true, he's my ultimate reference..."

Passion is a refuge

Baptiste, who vomits his anxieties in the truest sense of the term, smokes and has just been dumped, it's off to a bad start, isn't it? "But we all start off on the wrong foot at some point in our lives, right?" smiles the author, whose novel takes us on the path to resilience.

Resilience through theater, which nourishes as much as certain memories. Like this fictional grandfather who passes on to Baptiste his love of the stage. "In this case, mine really had this passion for theater…," confides the author, closing the personal parenthesis that merges with fiction.

"What's striking about the theater - at least that's my impression - is that the lives of others and the lives of our characters also allow us to find an echo in our own. I've been really lucky, but I have the feeling that literature, and theater especially, has allowed me to shift my prism of vision on what I was experiencing, to ask myself questions, sometimes to find answers... Even going to the theater has allowed me to evolve my relationship with the world, with human things, with love, with family, etc. As a result, I am very driven by the desire to pass this on to young people and to make them understand that theater, as in Molière's time, is still a mirror of our times."

Theater, a refuge and liberation for Baptiste. "Exactly. I think passion is a refuge in which one can feel free. At least, it's through passion that I felt free to find myself. A passion can allow a child to build themselves—a little far from their parents—or at least to feel protected sometimes, to create a bubble for themselves."

"Theater is punk"

A true declaration of love for the theatre, and an ode to transmission too, through the relationship that develops between its young hero and this actor who becomes his teacher for the duration of a scene taken from Cyrano.

"The dream of my life! To put on Cyrano... Every year, I have the staging that evolves. Cyrano, for me, is the greatest character. In music, in the language of Rostand, it is one of the most beautiful pieces in the French classical repertoire... It is a myth, just in the writing. And then, Cyrano, it is the beauty of panache, I discovered it at the time when I was discovering what adolescent complexes were, when we are convinced that, because we do not love ourselves, we cannot be loved by others. And suddenly, that is it, Cyrano, it is the strength of a man who is crumbling under the weight of his complex and who tries to take refuge in something else, like a sort of shield. And it is the most human thing in the world. That is to say, how we accept being loved, how we love ourselves, how we protect ourselves and how is it that we define ourselves in a society and in ambivalent relationships, especially when we love. He's the magnificent loser. It upset me for life..."

And then Cyrano, "it's punk" . A word from the vocabulary that often comes up throughout the pages. " It's my vision of theater, " adds Axel Auriant with a smile that we can guess, on the other end of the phone. I think that today, being punk feels good. And then, it also deconstructs the relationship we have with the classicism of these texts... In a consumerist society where everyone is on a screen, it's still punk to do theater today. Theater is one of the last places where we listen to a story without being biased by screens. And it allows us to question a lot of things."

Fayard Editions. 256 pages. 20.90 euros.