Face à la mère

From 15 years old

Performance created on October 2, 2024 at MC93, Bobigny

After spending twenty years in Africa and then Europe with her family, the mother chooses to return to her native land, Haiti — a country forsaken by the world — where she will die under tragic circumstances, leaving her son with an emptiness that only words might fill.

Several years later, the son decides to meet her beyond death, to confide to her — through a long poem — everything he never knew how to say, everything he never dared to express.
Throughout this love song, the son retraces the turmoil of a forty-year relationship filled with tenderness and emotion, mutual love and admiration, of cities and countries they visited together.
Alone on stage, he addresses his murdered mother in an intimate monologue that blends gentleness with fury.
More than a tribute, it is a journey — through mourning, memory, and exile.

With a pared-down staging, Facing the Mother is an act of love — love of words, love of the mother — where language unfolds without artifice.
It fills the entire space, carried by the intense and sensitive presence of Jean-René Lemoine, where every silence, every glance opens a breach into the memories of our own mothers.