When asked why, at forty-three years old, he launched into comedy when he embraced music at the age of eight, Ibrahim Maalouf responded like a sportsman “You have to get out of your comfort zone “. Our outstanding Franco-Lebanese trumpeter has always favored this philosophy throughout his career. We saw him in dance shows with the Ben Aïm brothers, we applauded him at the cinema where he created the soundtracks for around fifteen films. It’s because this artist doesn’t like being locked into a format. “We are in a time where we have to be careful about everything we do, everything we say because the networks can blow everything up, we have to fight that.”
With this play, Ibrahim Maalouf happily embarks on a new adventure. The texts of the novelist and columnist Kamel Daoud inspired Denise Chalem, who stages this meeting of a musician and a writer, one in Paris and the other in Oran. The two converse about the world, religion, culture, the body (especially that of a woman) and covid… The title of the piece is misleading: “A man who drinks always dreams of a man who listens”, because it is not an apology for wine and drinking, but the praise of a beautiful friendship between two men who know how to listen to and understand each other despite their own very different cultures.
Both characters are resolutely secular, both fight extremism of all religions. Not an easy subject these days. The result is a wonderful duo where Ibrahim Maalouf, opposite the actor Thibault de Montalembert, plays a little trumpet, a little piano, “but it’s the verb that counts” he confides. He, so accustomed to notes, today confronts the power of words, and with such brilliance!
Théâtre le 13e Art in Paris until March 31
