Michael Hirsch, with a few crazy spikes on his head and the laughing look of a page, is an actor. At 33, he has two one-man shows to his credit, presented from Paris to the highly renowned Avignon Festival, as well as a slew of roles in plays written by others. Michaël Hirsch plays characters who have wit and know how to dress, especially when it comes to being elegant indoors, like the famous Isidore Beaupieu, superstar of the already highly acclaimed Je pionce donc je suis . While he spends his confinement reading, live for the audience of his social networks, entire books like the very strong Magellan by Stefan Zweig, Michaël Hirsch told us over the phone what he likes about clothing. At the end of this reading, you might put on a dressing gown (don't bother looking, we don't offer any!). It's the season.
How do clothes become strategic elements when you appear on stage?
When I was in drama school, I was told a lot about the famous Robert Hirsch. He was a dancer and an actor. The first thing he did before starting to work on a role was to find the things that would work best for the role. Robert Hirsch believed that the way you feel the floor guides absolutely everything in your approach to a character. That's what we were told at drama school and, at the time, it really struck me. That story resonated with me, and it still does today.
When I wear sneakers on stage, I feel different, I am not the same as when I wear city shoes. The feeling I have of myself is different. Shoes are a revealer of my characters. More generally, clothes are like the skin of my character. In fact, it is strategic and even better, it is an essential element for my approach to acting. And then it is also my way of presenting myself to the world. I know that in the eyes of the spectators, it is important for what it tells them about one character in relation to another.
In your latest show, Je pionce donc je suis, presented at the Lucernaire in Paris, you play twenty-two characters at once and you almost never change costumes. How did you think about this aspect of your work?
The idea was to find a costume that would allow me to play all these characters in one, like a chameleon. So we had to find something fairly neutral. This was one of the most difficult points when staging the show. I had to have a garment that would look like pajamas. So with my costume designer, we chose a simple t-shirt and chinos made of a soft material, all in gray, with light shoes that could be reminiscent of slippers.
(...) clothes are like the skin of my character. In fact, it is strategic and even better, it is an essential element for my approach to the game. And then it is also my way of presenting myself to the world.
The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how intense it would be to perform this show. At the end of the first one, I found myself sweating. Sweating and gray. Let's just say it was obvious. There were sweat marks all over my costume. We absolutely had to find another outfit before performing the second one. So we switched to a black outfit, with a jacket and pants made to measure so that they would fit me perfectly on stage.
Many cons appear before their audience in a jacket and T-shirt , as if this combo had become the standard attire of the profession...
For stand-up people, you need a kind of everyday costume, and even an everyday garment. It's an aesthetic that must make you believe that it's something usual, innate, as if you just arrived on stage naturally, from the bar next door, and that's enough. As if there was no difference between the city and the stage. Many cons wear a jacket and a t-shirt, to tell the audience that they've made an effort, but at the same time that they're cool, relaxed. That's how I was dressed for my first show.
In Je pionce donc je suis, a show that praises sleep and laziness, you present the dressing gown as a "ceremonial outfit". You think one can be lazy and elegant?
My character, Isidore Beaupieu, embodies my previous life a bit. He's a guy who works in a big company, who gets up at dawn every morning to go and get tortured by a very manipulative boss, taking it upon himself because that's how life is and no other way, he tells himself. And then one day, Isidore Beaupieu falls asleep in the middle of a meeting. He gives up.
At a time when we constantly feel like we're running after time, I feel that sleep, rest, is like a revolutionary act. As a result, the clothing that goes with it is an element that should not be taken lightly. The dressing gown is serious. I find that it's a garment that we have too often neglected, forgotten, but which is really cool. I'm thinking of this kind of housecoat that we have seen on the shoulders of guys like Sacha Gitry, for example. With a dressing gown, you feel like you're well dressed even in pajamas. My ideal dressing gown is made of silk, with a slightly old-fashioned print, reminiscent of the pattern of a Hermès scarf. It must have a drape that says that I am an artist with my whole body.
Do you ever dress up in, shall we say, eccentric ways?
At the Avignon Festival, it's about doing everything we can to get the public to come and see our shows. Every year, I have a costume made to attract people's attention in the street. Once, I walked around with a big polystyrene question mark, velcroed to a t-shirt, with my head passing through the curve of the thing. I was all in turquoise blue. In a case like this, it's obvious that we put aside everything that has to do with ego.
In an age where we constantly feel like we are running out of time, I feel that sleep, rest, is like a revolutionary act.
At the last festival, for the presentation of Je pionce donc je suis, I was in a dressing gown in the street with a backpack shaped like a pillow. It was a pillow with two straps, with an opening to stuff things in. The aesthetic of the wanker is like no other, a Gaston Lagaffe-style comic strip character. People were hallucinating as one would hallucinate if one woke up after years in a coma and discovered in the street all these people in masks queuing to buy pasta because of a lockdown.
The Avignon Festival is the event that brings together every year all the theater, and the world of the stage in general, people in France. Enough to find a lot of special looks there, right?
We must not forget that the Avignon Festival is a fair. With its share of fairground animals. We are all fairground animals in Avignon. So there is the drama school student. His name is Boris and he has long hair. He has been reading Chekhov all year and is convinced that Anya in The Cherry Orchard is the central character of his entire work. He is dressed in velvet clothes, with a scarf to protect his speech apparatus. Not far from Boris, we find the famous bola players, the circus people who, more or less, correspond to the image that we can have of intermittent show business workers. The comparison is quite simple: what makes the difference between the intermittent show business worker and the punk with a dog is the dog.
In Avignon, of course, there are very serious actors. People who cannot stand, at least for their artistic soul, the fact that there are too many people in the streets of the city for the festival. Too painful for them. There, all the fashion fancies are imaginable. A turtleneck sweater despite the month of August, for example. And then there are the venue programmers. We notice them. For them, because it's summer, linen is the priority. Linen everywhere. It has to gape. Birkenstocks on their feet and, often, a little lack of deodorant, almost claimed. The guys, they see six shows a day, they don't want to bother. They mark their territory.