Why keep it simple when you can be original? In his first one-man show, Authentique, David Castello-Lopes surprises the public with a show full of crazy stories and animated by video extracts taken from his Interesting columns on Arte and Suisse? broadcast on RTS.
The objective: to prove that even someone who seems 100% authentic still has an element of artifice in them. David Castello-Lopes discusses the mechanics that explain this phenomenon: vanity, bad faith, language tics, positional goods. Successive stories demonstrate that all human beings simply have the power to “do gender”.
At the Cité des Congrès in Nantes, in April, the 42-year-old man launched the evening with a “participatory workshop” with his 1,900 spectators. It all starts with a video of Emmanuel Macron at the Châlons-en-Champagne Fair on September 1, 2016, who came to see “the real life of real people”. The comedian, former head of the video department of Le Monde, questions the public: who are “the real people”? After scrolling through several photos on the giant screen at the back of the stage, the verdict falls: “the real people are those who are not rich”.
In his show, the journalist is never far from the comedian. Driven by the desire to be effective, interesting and factual, the man of Portuguese origin and Jewish faith is as direct as possible in his jokes. “We must remove everything that is not of extreme importance,” he believes. Full of self-deprecation, the columnist on France Inter also talks about his life and recounts all the times when he, too, was convinced of being authentic.
The result is all the more convincing because the words are original and the jokes seem like something you’ve never heard before. From the history of the Portuguese anthem to advertisements from the 1980s, including the great moment of his interview with François Hollande in January, the one-man show lives up to its name.
The result is all the more refreshing as David Castello-Lopes strives to cultivate an originality that many comedians do not have or have lost. The former student at the University of Barkeley in California did not go through the school of Parisian Comedy Clubs, whose recipes are too often detected. Less below-the-belt jokes, a good dose of sincerity, this is the perfect recipe to make the audience fall in love with the end of an hour and a half show, almost too short.