Driven by the intimate staging of Romane Bohringer, Anne Charrier embarks on her first solo performance with Rose Royal, an adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s novella. The show, created at the Avignon Off Festival in July 2025, settles in for the autumn. Indeed, it takes place at the Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. A dive into solitude and control, where every silence weighs and the actress reveals a restrained fragility.
In Avignon, a voice that plunges into the night
There are evenings when the stage resembles a counter. A woman lingers there, bag in hand, memories slung over her shoulder. With Rose Royal, actress Anne Charrier uses solitude as theatrical material. Thus, she sharpens a blade to illuminate the shadow. Adapted from the dark short text by Nicolas Mathieu, Goncourt Prize winner in 2018, this solo performance, directed by Romane Bohringer, took its first leap at the Avignon Off Festival, from July 5 to 26, 2025, at the Théâtre des Halles, before moving to Paris for a long autumn run.
In Avignon, the after-day heat still clung to the cobblestones. Charrier appeared almost unadorned at the edge of the imaginary bar where Rose waits to be seen differently. In this direct address, there was the tone of a woman with a cracked armor. Moreover, one could feel the precision of an actress who does not seek bravado, but accuracy. The audience, packed in the stone, held its breath. One could already sense the path being sketched: a text with raw social acuity. Furthermore, a staging refusing showiness was taking shape. Additionally, there was a performer who embraces the abyss without losing herself.
Paris, Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées: the long test of time
Autumn extends the experience. At the Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, Rose Royal settles from September 12 to December 28, 2025, with performances Thursday-Saturday at 9 PM and Sunday at 4 PM, with breaks on October 9 and 10, 2025, for a duration of 1 hour 15 minutes. The regularity of this schedule indicates the gamble: to give the show time to carve out its place. Thus, it becomes part of the cultural agenda, and gives the actress the space to refine the vibrant string of the role.
The Studio, nestled under the grand house on Avenue Montaigne, suits the format. Its physical proximity to the audience fosters the nervous listening required by Nicolas Mathieu‘s writing: tight, relentless sentences that describe an "ordinary" woman caught in the vertigo of an encounter. Romane Bohringer orchestrates a theater of approach, almost exposed, where every silence is heard and every movement becomes a sign.
A mechanism of control dissected with a scalpel
The material is familiar: a woman in her fifties, a bar, a man who enters, shirt stained, and the pulse of a possible romance. But Rose Royal is not a fairy tale. The novella by Nicolas Mathieu, published in 2019, closely observes the mechanism of control. Moreover, it explores emotional dependency to the point where willpower merges with fear. Anne Charrier, who co-signs the adaptation with Gabor Rassov, draws from this material a score where irony barely shields the wound.
On stage, the scenography by Rozenn Le Gloahec favors simplicity: few objects, clean lines, a bar that is more suggested than displayed. The lighting by Thibault Vincent sculpts the areas of retreat and tipping. They envelop Rose in a halo that tightens. Similarly, this halo resembles the vice of a drifting relationship. The costumes by Céline Guignard-Rajot convey just enough elegance and fatigue, a desire for style that does not erase the heart’s weariness. Aurélien Chaussade, as assistant, ensures the fine-tuning of a story in a single breath. Benoît Delacoudre creates a rumbling music that never overdoes it, a discreet sign of tension seeking its path. Gladys Gambie inscribes in the body a few diagonals, a tremor, a way of holding onto the world.
In Charrier’s performance, there is a way of not judging Rose, of accepting her contradictions. She knows how to convey the energy of conquest and the admission of fear in the same line. The voice veils, then straightens. The words become a gesture of survival. Behind the fiction, one hears the demand of a staging that refuses effects. It relies on trust: that an actress, alone, can carry the ambiguity of a feeling without highlighting it.
The actress facing the solo challenge: an assumed turning point
Anne Charrier was known for her roles on television and in cinema. Here, she tries her hand at her first solo stage performance. The choice says something about a career moment. At over fifty, the actress claims the desire to speak differently. She wishes to stand before the audience without sharing. This shift, she makes with a chosen accomplice, Romane Bohringer, who offers her the setting of a staging close to the skin.
This artistic gesture resonates with a bustling current reality. Charrier does not abandon the screen, far from it. She finds the path of continuous presence, of an expanded territory, where the stage nourishes the camera and vice versa. The theater becomes a place of oxygen, an echo chamber that gives texture back to the voice. It is also a way of inhabiting time differently and accepting repetition as a form of asceticism. This allows for gaining the naturalness that only comes through repeated performances.
A text by Nicolas Mathieu, between social chronicle and intimate darkness
One would be wrong to think of it as a simple story of a meeting. In Rose Royal, Nicolas Mathieu examines the subtle music of peripheral existences and the murmurs of a country in doubt. The short novel, published before the pandemic, anticipates the shiver of retreats and muted anger. In the stage adaptation signed by Anne Charrier and Gabor Rassov, the material becomes denser: the cries become velvet, the gestures chiseled, reality reclaims its rights through the voice of one.
The theater here does not seek illustrative fidelity. It allows for ellipses, reprises, almost guilty laughter. One hears Mathieu’s language with its concrete sentences and rough tenderness. Moreover, one perceives the breathing of a performer who modulates, reorients, and shifts. The result is a stubborn tension, a beauty that refuses ornamentation and chooses clarity.
TV, cinema, radio: a multi-speed return
This stage "turning point" is accompanied by an increased presence on screens. In cinema, on September 10, 2025, the release of Connemara directed by Alex Lutz, based on the novel by Nicolas Mathieu. Charrier plays a secondary role, on the edge of a romantic chronicle that looks at the Vosges without nostalgia. On television, France 2 launches La Vallée fracturée on September 22 and 29, then on October 6, 2025, a mini-series where the actress plays a mayor caught in the conflict of a territory at the time of drilling and environmental anger, available in full on France.tv. The season had started earlier in the year with Haut les cœurs, a TV film distinguished at the Luchon Festival on February 8, 2025, with the award for best single fiction and the audience award.
And as the stage loves the porosity of the airwaves, Anne Charrier appears on France Inter on September 26, 2025, in ‘La Bande originale’, where Oldelaf signs a chronicle. It’s a way to cross audiences and remind that a show is also told outside the walls. Moreover, it can be done at lunchtime.
At the height of a spectator: empathy without pathos
What makes Rose Royal strong is the human stance. Romane Bohringer embraces Rose’s perspective without excusing it, and Anne Charrier advances openly. The show does not edify, it observes. It scrutinizes the desire for control, up to the purchase of a weapon to soothe fear. Moreover, it explores the spiral of a passion that ends up governing everything. Nothing is spectacular, everything is meaningful: a way of standing, a strand of hair pushed back, a silence suddenly too long.
The psychotherapist Anne-Clotilde Ziégler, occasionally invited around the project, provides a discreet counterpoint: talking about control without over-psychologizing it, reminding of the porous boundary between choice and constraint, inviting listening. The stage never becomes a platform, it remains theater, that is, a place of regulated emotions, of danger tamed by form. In the room, one feels the breaths synchronizing. The light falls, the darkness ends, and yet the discomfort persists, like a lingering scent.
Workshop work: scenography, lighting, costumes, music
One leaves the Studio remembering a scenography as a trace rather than a decor. Moreover, one retains a light that cuts without crushing and costumes telling a biography in three shades. Furthermore, one notices a music that prefers suggestion to effect. The deliberately reduced setup sticks to the subject. Moreover, emotional dependency is better heard when noise is removed. Additionally, the quest for control becomes clearer this way. Furthermore, the obsession with the sign is also distinguished in this silence. The theater becomes a laboratory of perception, and Anne Charrier is its patient operator.
This economy of means also aligns with the spirit of the times. It evokes a stage that, after years of budgetary uncertainties, relearns simplicity. Moreover, it advocates for light formats, which the Off Festival audience has widely supported. In this logic, Rose Royal places itself in a virtuous path: less decor, more listening, a more direct, almost ecological, relationship to the story.
Rumors, homonymies, and precision of facts
As a reminder, no family link connects Anne Charrier to Brigitte Bardot. The confusion arises from a homonymy with Anna Charrier, whose name circulated in the approximate genealogies of social networks. However, the actress continues her path, far from borrowed mythologies. She remains faithful to this underground work that eventually comes to light.
On another level, precision matters. The Parisian version of Rose Royal extends over more than three months, at the Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. It offers regular schedules and a duration of 1 hour 15 minutes. It is within this well-defined framework that the show leaves the feeling of dangerous freedom. Even though the outcome is known, the trajectory retains its bite. The theater reminds us that one can go very far with little, provided the staging holds the arc. Moreover, it is essential that the actress accepts to expose herself there.