After thirteen years at the head of the Octagon of Pully (VD), playwright and writer Yasmine Char is bowing out. His text “Ami(s)”, inspired by his own experience of meeting artists, is directed by Sandra Gaudin on October 30, 31 and November 1.
In a cable car going away from the plain, there are two men, in their sixties, who are complete opposites: Sam, an old singing star, and Carl, one of his fans, hypersensitive and discreet. The first, in the midst of an existential crisis, dreams of only one thing: to be left alone. The second carries within him a request that has remained secret for too long and comes to demand justice. When one of them activates the emergency stop of the cable car, they are trapped and forced to talk.
A fable about the quest for recognition, solitude and the human condition, “Ami(s)” invites the public to reflect on the fragility of life, the dizziness we experience in the face of its challenges and to question what it means to succeed in life.
This cable car camera is signed by the author Yasmine Char. The piece closes the journey of the woman who is living her last season at the Octagon in Pully as director and who claims to have drawn her inspiration from her long association with capricious stars. “What is fame? How do these stars live? This frantic race for recognition, this need for validation that we can all have and which is often born from an injury of recognition interested her”, explains Sandra Gaudin in the Vertigo show on October 21 about Yasmine Char, whose text she directed.
>> Listen to the interview with Sandra Gaudin about “Ami(s)”:
The fan and the artist
“This fan is ready for anything. We are really in a tandem, a bit like in ‘La grande vadrouille’, with the dominant white clown à la Louis de Funès, played by Nicolas Rossier, the aging star and who questions his worn-out functioning. And then the Auguste, the clumsy person, this disturbing, lunar fan, also insistent to the point of absurdity (Thierry Romanens editor’s note). This contrast makes the humor of the piece”, indicates Sandra Gaudin.
Rapper La Gale completes the cast in the role of a surfer who speaks young, “a girl who cooks at the resort and who vents to her friend on the phone how much she doesn’t at all want to go see a dying old singer”, says the musician with a smile.
No matter how much we imagine ourselves unique, we are in reality drowned in the crowd, the piece reminds us. “In this hyper-connected world and [centré] on oneself, these two solitudes intersect and are difficult to communicate. But the little they manage to do creates a little scrap of friendship, a spark, which gives hope,” concludes Saudra Gaudin.
Comments collected by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Adaptation web: Melissa Härtel
“Ami(s)” by Yasmine Char, directed by Sandra Gaudin, with Nicolas Rossier, Thierry Romanens, La Gale, Théâtre de l’Octogone, Pully (VD) on October 30 and 31, 2025 and November 1, 2025, then on tour at the Théâtre Nuithonie, Villars-sur-Glâne (FR), on November 6 and 7, 2025, at the Salle commune of Onex (GE) on December 9, 2025 and at the Théâtre de Grand-Champ, Gland (VD) on December 11, 2025.
