Parler Pointu - Tournée

Benjamin Tholozan takes us on a journey to the heart of his southern roots. With humour and tenderness, he explores the question of accent, language, and identity, between family heritage and the desire to perform on stage. A show for all those who, one day, sought their place between two worlds. Benjamin Tholozan grew up in a village in the South of France. A Provençal land, Latin, violent, boisterous. A land of bullfighting. The trivial and the sacred constantly intertwine there. His whole family still lives there, and everyone speaks with a southern accent. Except him. It's impossible to detect in his phrasing the slightest southern intonation, the slightest word inherited from the Romance patois of his ancestors. To become an actor, he erased his accent. He now speaks “pointu”, as they say in the South to refer to the Parisian accent, that of normative French spoken in the media and on theatre stages. Parler Pointu tells the story of the gradual abandonment of regional languages and accents, and what this loss represents, both intimately and politically. In this historical and family epic, Benjamin Tholozan embodies with ardour, joy, and precision a whole gallery of characters who made French, and more particularly the Touraine accent, the only way of speaking still considered legitimate today.

written and performed by Benjamin Tholozan / written and directed by Hélène François / with Benjamin Tholozan and Brice Ormain alternating with Guillaume L'église / musical creation by Brice Ormain / lighting design by Claire Gondrexon / set design by Aurélie Lemaignen

What the press says:

Benjamin Tholozan, through Parler pointu, his own story, denounces the silence imposed on regional dialects, particularly Occitan. It is both very serious and very funny. L'Humanité

Accompanied by the music of Brice Ormain, whose chords readily draw us to the shores of the Mediterranean, the actor propels us into the past, to the origins of French. Parler pointu, directed by Hélè