Barely ten days after its premiere at the Théâtre de La Commune in Aubervilliers as part of the Festival d’Automne, Non-lieu was presented at Le Parvis on Tuesday evening. This latest production from Olivier Coulon-Jablonka’s Moukden-Théâtre opens with an excerpt from a television news report dated October 26, 2014, at the moment when Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve is laboriously attempting to explain, in carefully chosen words, the death of environmental activist Rémi Fraisse at the Sivens dam construction site during a nighttime standoff between the gendarmerie and opponents of the project. The play is structured like a tragedy. Not the tragedy of the death of a 21-year-old, but the tragedy of a criminal trial that died before it even began. The investigation ended with a dismissal of the case in January 2018, ruling that the gendarme who threw the fatal grenade and his superiors should not be prosecuted. This was confirmed by the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation. Even though the state has since been condemned by the Administrative Court and the European Court of Human Rights, the taste remains bitter, and there is a strong feeling of having been deprived of a proper judicial explanation, perhaps even of revelations. This is all the more true given that the two investigating judges in charge of the case delegated the investigation to other gendarmes, those from the General Inspectorate of the National Gendarmerie.
It is in this vein that Olivier Coulon-Jablonka wrote and directed a politically charged play performed by seven actors who will take turns playing all the characters in the drama. No need for elaborate sets or slamming doors to perform an autopsy on this trial that was stillborn. The tension is palpable both on stage and in the audience as the horrific machinery of the operation is laid bare through the testimonies of the gendarmes who were on the construction site and their superiors, the activists also present, and Rémi-Fraisse's parents. And even if more theatricality would have been needed to maintain such intense attention throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance, the announcement of the dismissal of the case arrives with a shocking, almost deadly, impact, highlighting the necessity of a trial that will never take place.
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