In Lausanne, Simon McBurney conjures John Berger back to the stage
At Théâtre de Vidy, the British actor performs "Questions for John", a one-man conversation with the writer who died in 2017, as part of events marking what would have been Berger's hundredth year.
Simon McBurney is performing "Questions for John" at the Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne through 8 November, according to Le Temps. The piece is staged as a conversation with John Berger, the British essayist, novelist and poet who died in 2017, and forms part of a series of events marking the centenary of his birth in 1926.
Le Temps traces the show back to a photograph McBurney still carries on his phone: an image of himself with Berger, taken in autumn 2016 at the writer's house in Quincy, in Haute-Savoie, between woods and pastureland. Berger was ninety then, weakened, and the paper describes him in the photo as bearing "un air de roi Arthur" with white hair and eyes alert, as if watching for a passing goldfinch. The two men are shown lying in the same bed, the same straw, likened by the paper to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.
According to the newspaper, that image is the seed from which the production grew: a show about the grace of an encounter and how its light keeps refracting into dialogue long after death. The run at Vidy is one of several events in Switzerland marking Berger's centenary.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.