Théâtre La Semeuse premieres a play written by a man who lost his daughter in the 2016 truck attack and still sees humanity where others don’t.
“Obscene, outraged, lyrical, blasphemous, irreverent – poetic, in short.” That is the unexpected way Thierry Vimal describes Ça passe crème, his chronicle of the 2022 trial of the terrorist attack on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais on 14 July 2016 that cost the life of his 12-year-old daughter Amie. But then, Vimal has never been interested in the expected.
Now that chronicle is coming to the stage. Adapted by Vimal himself into a solo performance, PROM_14 premieres at the Théâtre de La Semeuse in Nice just days before the tenth anniversary of the attack. It is directed by Jonathan Gensburger and performed by Julien Storini, two figures with strong ties to Nice’s theatrical life.
A monumental and challenging solo for actor Julien Storini, but one that he can carry thanks to his range of play. And for all the very real human tragedy, the play is interspersed with lighthearted moments. “It is certainly not our intention to plunge the audience into the heart of the horror, even if a few scenes are bound to evoke it,” says Thierry Vimal. Rather, the aim is to take the viewer through the chronology of the various stages of the trial, from its opening to the verdict, inviting them to discover the course of events and the atmosphere of a historic anti-terrorism trial, through an unconventional lens.
Vimal’s text – sharply observed free verse, alive with dark irony – sketches a gallery of characters: lawyers, experts, witnesses, victims, defendants. It captures the surreal atmosphere of a historic legal proceeding with the eye of a courtroom caricaturist, hunting down hypocrisy and refusing the consolations of solemnity. A musical soundtrack swings between ABBA and the Stooges, with room for Ghostbusters and a nod to Dick Rivers for what one observer called the “vintage niço-niçois” touch.
Jonathan Gensburger says his decision to work on the project was instant. “The moment I finished reading Thierry’s chronicles, I knew I had to work with him.” His directorial approach is deliberately stripped back: raw text, no theatrical flourishes, and a set that is minimal, compressed… described as “feeling like a truck cab, a defendant’s dock, a bubble, a radio studio”. Several microphones, one performer, one hour and ten minutes.
Among the testimony Vimal chronicles, one moment cuts through everything else: a civil party describing, for the very first time, what she heard:
“The people were falling like dominoes, excuse me for the word. They made the sound of a bin bag you drop and that falls to the ground. You see?”
She taps her fist into the flat of her other hand.
Thud. Thud. Hard. Slow. Regular. Long.
It is the very first time she has described the sound, the rhythm. She weeps.
Vimal has been a published author since 1999, but it is the writing he has done in the shadow of 14 July that has defined the last decade of his career. 19 tonnes, published in 2019, was his raw personal account of loss. Au titre des souffrances endurées, a fiction interrogating the failures of support for terrorism victims, won the Prix Nice Baie des Anges in 2022. His chronicle of the trial earned him a place among Nice Matin’s ten personalities of the year and inspired a podcast on France Culture.
Throughout it all, his daughter Amie, whom he lovingly calls la Señorita, and who was lost at only twelve years old, is never far from the page… nor the stage. In the show’s closing scene, as the verdict is announced and some in the courtroom applaud the eighteen-year sentences handed to the two principal defendants, Vimal finds himself unable to join them. “Does it mean we got them? That we screwed them, that we’re giving them the finger? No, no – it’s them who screwed us.” The laughter, never far away in this show, stops completely. Because the truth, as Vimal writes, is this: “For always, here below, we have lost.”
PROM_14 represents exactly the tension between “It will never be the same” and “Life goes on” that has become the new normal for the Niçois population. Ten years on, Nice is telling its own story, through commemorations, official memory, and also through theatre: irreverent, alive, made by people from here, for people from here, about something that happened here. That feels like exactly the right way to mark an anniversary that is still heavy on the heart of many.
Video via jonathan gensburger on YouTube
The performances on 25 and 26 June are sold out, there are still some seats available for an extra show on 27 June at 9 pm. Call for tickets or reserve online.
The show is recommended for audiences 16 and over.
VENUE DETAILS
Théâtre de la Semeuse
2, montée Auguste Kerl
06300 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 93 92 85 08
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photographs and images courtesy Théâtre de la Semeuse
- Lead image aquarelle by John Mejia (edited – cropped)
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