When he learned he would be playing Macheath, in The Threepenny Opera (1928), by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill – his first main role on stage – Birane Ba did not ask the German director Thomas Ostermeier why he had chosen him. However, this role of thug often falls to shady-looking forty-year-olds, while he, at 28, with happy teeth and tender eyes, has the features of a nice boy. “I never ask, “Why me?” assures Birane Ba. But I may ask: “Are you sure”? » The day of the audition, notably in front of the co-director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival – where the piece was created this summer as part of a partnership with the Comédie-Française, where it is performed until the 5 November -, the actor had chosen, to prove that he could sing in tune, Everything scampers off, by Edith Piaf.
A year of preparation with singing masters was necessary for him to shape the role of this schemer and thief who seeks to seal his social ascension through a marriage with a well-born girl. Placing the voice, sliding from the melody to the response, flowing into a gentleman’s manner… In this dual use, Birane Ba imposes his usual luminous presence in a more murky variation.
Complex characters
In the spring, the general public was able to discover him as a resilient inmate in the hit film I will always see your faces, by Jeanne Herry, or at the Comédie-Française, embodying the face of a well-bred and scoundrel angel who converts an entire family to lust, in a free adaptation of Theorem, by Pasolini. As if, after a few years of initiation, we reserved for him the complex characters which allow him to display all his art… The newspaper critics have their eye on him. They can be praising, and sometimes sharp, towards Birane Ba, who sometimes reads them (“Error not to be reproduced!” »), as much as their fellow reporters love to recount his trajectory in the style of success story.
Son of a worker converted into a mediator and a cleaning lady, both of Senegalese origin, he grew up in an apartment in the Poterie district, in Vernon (Eure). Six sisters, one brother, bunk beds, dodgeballs and soccer games between two episodes of the animated series Olive and Tom. The first suggestion comes from “Mrs Solomon” (the names of his teachers are beacons in the memory of Birane Ba), after the recitation of a poem: “You should join the drama club.” »
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