Interview met eric emmanuel schmitt biography

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has had a bad night. He’s fallen foul of a rotten cold and is hoping to be well enough to play Momo, Ibrahim and other characters in the one-actor stage adaptation of his famous novel, Mr Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran tonight. “If I have to cancel, I’ll be in an even worse state than if I perform!” he sighs down the phone, between coughing fits. His determination is no surprise when you know his commitment to communicating with the audience in order to brighten up their lives. “We live in societies that are stamped with the seal of misery. But misery is related to absence, and once you nurture it, there’ll be no shortage of things for it to feed off, because you can always spot the absences in your life: the people you’ve lost, the time you’ve wasted, the money you don’t have … Whereas joy is related to plenitude. It’s about the ability to enjoy relations with other people, about taking pleasure in the ability to do things and in the things you’ve done. Every life is full of joy and misery and it develops according to the light that’s cast on it,” adds the writer who, in a delightful and accessible way, tackles major existential issues, such as faith and the search for happiness. And that is his recipe for global success.

Testifying to that success are his twenty-odd plays, which include Enigma Variations, The Visitor and The Diary of Anne Frank, all performed regularly in 50 countries, while an array of best sellers, such as Oscar and the Lady in Pink, The Alternative Hypothesis, Odette Toulemondeand Other Stories, and more recently, Night of Fire and The Man Who Could See Through Faces, have been translated into 44 languages. The result is that this doctor of philosophy, who grew up near Lyon in France, has, in less than two decades, become one of the most widely read French-language authors and one of the most frequently

A play entitled “The Challenge of Jerusalem”, by French playwright and novelist Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, opens the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples.

“If you think you understand something about the current situation in Jerusalem, it means that they have explained it badly to you,” says Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, commenting on a famous mural by Banksy, which depicts a peace dove hit by a bullet.

“Jerusalem is tragic,” the French playwright writes in his book adapted into a play directed by Otello Cenci, which was performed on the opening day of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini.

Jerusalem is tragic, and the events of the past months make this statement even more true.

The stage presents the tangle of a pylon that becomes a staircase and a bridge, and has the unmistakable profile of a cross.

Against the backdrop of stacks of bricked-up, calcined books, white as skeletons, the question “Who are you?” emerges from a constellation of pulsating, living fragments, which offer glimpses of the Holy Land that are different from time to time: walls, graffiti, faces, streets, churches, rubble, fragments of music and songs.

It is a story of transformation and conversion. “who are you? The Jerusalem challenge” was born in the heart of the greatest of contradictions, in the midst of the apparently irrelevant facts of daily life. The reason, writes Schmitt, is that “the cradle of the extraordinary is the trivial.”

On stage are actor Ettore Bassi, the voice, the dance and the grace of the Syrian singer Mirna Kassis, along with Matteo Damele, Filippo Dionigi, Tomas Milner, and a video with Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt himself, who uses his strong French accent to give an even more self-ironic tone to the excerpts of the book he chooses to read.

In one of the funniest scenes of the piece, he even mimics the “gasping of a fish” of a child who, in church, does not know the words of the songs and opens and closes his mouth at random, without making

Franco-Belgian playwright

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (French pronunciation:[eʁikemanɥɛlʃmit]; born 28 March 1960) is a Franco-Belgian playwright, short story writer and novelist, as well as a film director. His plays have been staged in over fifty countries all over the world.

Life

Early years

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's parents were teachers of physical education and sport, and his father later became a physiotherapist and masseur in paediatric hospitals. He was also a French boxing champion while his mother was a medal-winning runner. His grandfather was an artisan jeweller.

The "Classiques & Contemporains" edition of La Nuit de Valognes (Don Juan on Trial) claims that Schmitt depicts himself as a rebellious teenager who detested received wisdom and was sometimes prone to violent outbursts. According to Schmitt, however, it was philosophy that saved him and taught him to be himself and to feel that he was free. One day, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Célestins to see a performance of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac starring Jean Marais. Her son was moved to tears and the seeds of his passion for the theatre were sown. After the show, he told his mother that he wanted to "be like the man on the poster"; his mother thought he meant the actor, Jean Marais, but he replied: "No!" and read out the name on the poster "Edmond Rostand". He then began to write. Later, he would say: "At sixteen, I realised (or decided) that I was a writer, and I wrote, produced and acted in my first plays at high school." To improve his style, he threw himself with frenzied zeal into exercises of pastiche and re-writing, especially Molière.

Education

After preparatory classes at the Lycée du Parc for France's elite universities, Schmitt passed the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure. He was a student there between 1980 and 1985, leaving with the top French teaching qualification in philosophy (agrégé de phil

In La traversée des temps (Crossing Time), the first volume of which, Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost), was published in 2021, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt has set himself the mammoth challenge of writing fiction to tell the story of humanity. Bringing together scientific, medical, religious and philosophical knowledge and creating strong, tender and very real characters, he propels readers from one world to the next, from Prehistory to our own time and from evolutions to revolutions, while the past illuminates the present. In Book II, La Porte du ciel (2021 – Heaven's Gate), wearing his extraordinary scholarship lightly, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt brings readers another detective-style novel set in the Near Middle East and an era portrayed by the Bible. With the pen of a visionary and informed by the latest research in Assyriology, he reproduces the complexity and glories of Mesopotamia, a region we know so little about but to which we owe so much. Soleil sombre (2022 – The Sun Goes Down) takes readers to Ancient Egypt and a civilisation that prospered for more than three thousand years. Book III of Crossing Time is full of surprises and reimagines a world in full swing, a world that still seems like an interlude in History, sublime and enigmatic in equal measure, but whose relics have nevertheless been preserved. In Le défi de Jérusalem (2023 – The Challenge of Jerusalem), Schmitt touches base with the Holy Land, where he had a second epiphany. The travel diary he produced of his time there records his doubts and musings and the sensations and amazement he experienced in the region, right up to the final surprise and his encounter in Jerusalem with the being he names “the Incomprehensible”. La Rivale (2023 – The Rival) is a novel in which, with his inimitable mischievous wit, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt sketches a portrait of Maria Callas as never