Daddy? Tell me yes, daddy… With the title of her new show, Marion Siéfert sets the tone. This young director in sight signs for the first time in great form in one of the most prestigious theaters in France – the Odéon, in Paris. It is again and again the patriarchy that is in the crosshairs here, a patriarchy that the female artists, who finally arrive at the orders of important productions, do not cease to unravel.
With originality, Marion Siéfert tackles the subject through the universe of video games and the multiple avatars they allow you to wear. And thus explores how, under cover of modernity, they renew with formidable efficiency the mechanisms of exploitation of women. The talent of the director, her touch, is to use all the means of the theater for a mise en abyme of these virtual worlds, placed opposite, or rather digested by this art which is, in essence, that of the carnal presence and the real.
It is therefore by a huge screen occupying the entire space of the opening of the scene that starts the show. Screen on which takes place one of these warrior games with amazons with machine guns and “bad boys” happy with them circulating at the speed of light in vertical and luxuriant cities. After ten minutes of virtual immersion, return to reality: that of a family in the south of France – mother caregiver, father watchman – living as she can (that is to say with strong alcohol and other substances) his social downgrading.
Strange initiatory journey
Thus begins the story of Mara, the youngest of the three daughters of the family. Mara is 13, she has started playing video games, and her avatar comes into contact with that of an older man, Daddy. Marion Siéfert and its co-author, Matthieu Bareyre, then imagine a science fiction story where the game would allow the very concrete takeover and exploitation of the human person. Mara will thus be “recruited” in a game that is played in real life, where she will be put in competition, sold, abused, used in all possible ways by this Daddy, a 27-year-old seducer with green eyes.
Marion Siéfert never places herself in overhang in the description of this ordinary French family, wounded by the ferocity of the current times, a family that Mara sees as a foil. It nonetheless legitimizes the young girl’s equally ferocious desire to escape from this blocked horizon, a desire that will lead her on a strange initiatory journey.
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