Credits: Frantogian (own work) / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 3.0.
Carried by the intimate staging of Romane Bohringer, Anne Charrier embarks on her first one person performance with Rose Royal, an adaptation of the short story by Nicolas Mathieu. The show, created at the Avignon Off Festival in July 2025, opens in the fall. Indeed, it takes place at the Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. A plunge into solitude and control, where every silence weighs and the actress exposes a contained fragility.
In Avignon, A Voice That Throws Itself Into The Night
There are nights when the stage feels like a bar counter. A woman lingers there, bag on her arm, memories slung across her body. With Rose Royal, the 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 one person performance, directed by Romane Bohringer, had its first run at the Festival Off d’Avignon, from July 5 to 26, 2025, at the Théâtre des Halles, before moving to Paris for an extended fall reprise.
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 in cracked armor. Also felt was the precision of an actress who does not seek bravado, but truth. The audience, packed into the stone, held its breath. One could already sense the route taking shape: a text with raw social acuity. Also emerging was a staging that refuses showiness. Furthermore, there was a performer who embraces the abyss without getting lost.
Paris, Studio of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées: The Long Time of the Test
Autumn prolongs the experience. At the Studio de la Comédie des Champs-Élysées, Rose Royal runs from September 12 to December 28, 2025, with performances Thursday–Saturday at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m., and dark nights on October 9 and 10, 2025, for a running time of 1 H 15. The regularity of this schedule signals the wager: to give the show the time to carve out its place. Thus, it is part of the cultural calendar, and gives the actress space to refine the vibrating string of the role.
The Studio, housed beneath the main theater on Avenue Montaigne, suits the format. Its physical proximity to the spectator fosters the nervous listening demanded by Nicolas Mathieu’s writing: tight, relentless sentences that describe an “ordinary” woman swept up by the vertigo of an encounter. Romane Bohringer stages an intimate theater of approach, almost uncovered, where every silence is heard and the slightest 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, a stained shirt and the pulse of a possible romance. But Rose Royal is not a fairy tale. Nicolas Mathieu’s short story, published in 2019, examines up close the mechanism of control. It also explores emotional dependence to the point where will becomes indistinguishable from fear. Anne Charrier, who co-wrote the adaptation with Gabor Rassov, draws from this material a score where irony barely shields the wound.
On stage, Rozenn Le Gloahec’s scenography favors simplicity: few objects, clean lines, a bar suggested more than displayed. Thibault Vincent’s lighting sculpts the zones of retreat and tipping points. They envelop Rose in a halo that tightens. Likewise, this halo resembles the vice of a relationship gone awry. Céline Guignard-Rajot’s costumes convey just enough elegance and fatigue, a desire for style that does not erase the heart’s weariness. Aurélien Chaussade, as assistant, watches over the fine-tuning of a one-breath narrative. Benoît Delacoudre makes a score rumble that never overplays, a discreet sign of a tension seeking its way. Gladys Gambie inscribes a few diagonals, a tremor, a manner of holding oneself in the world.
In Charrier’s performance there is a way of not judging Rose, of accepting her contradictions. She can render the energy of conquest and the admission of fear in the same line. The voice veils, then straightens. Words become an act of survival. Behind the fiction, one hears the demand of a staging that refuses effects. It bets on trust: that an actress, alone, can carry the ambiguity of a feeling without overstating it.
The Actress Put to the Solo Test: A Deliberate Turning Point
We knew Anne Charrier from television and film roles. Here, she tries her hand at her first stage solo. The choice says something about this moment in her career. In her fifties, the actress claims the desire to speak differently. She wants to stand before the audience without sharing the stage. She makes this move with a chosen collaborator, Romane Bohringer, who offers her the setting of a direction that is skin-close.
This artistic gesture resonates with a busy current situation. Charrier does not abandon the screen, far from it. She finds a path of continuous presence, an expanded territory where stage feeds the camera and vice versa. 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. That allows one to gain the naturalness that comes only through repeated takes.
A Text by Nicolas Mathieu, Between Social Chronicle and Intimate Darkness
It would be a mistake to see only a simple story of a meeting. In Rose Royal, Nicolas Mathieu examines the small music of peripheral lives and the murmurings of a country in doubt. The short novel, published before the pandemic, senses the shiver of inward turns and muted angers. In the stage adaptation by Anne Charrier and Gabor Rassov, the material thickens: screams become velvet, gestures are chiselled, the real asserts itself through the voice of one.
The theater here does not seek illustrative fidelity. It allows ellipses, reprises, almost guilty laughs. One hears Mathieu’s language with its concrete sentences and rough tenderness. Also perceived is the breathing of a performer who modulates, redirects, and shifts. The result is an obstinate tension, a beauty that refuses ornament and chooses clarity.
TV, Film, Radio: A Return at Several Speeds
This scenic “turning point” comes with increased screen presence. In cinema, on September 10, 2025, Connemara directed by Alex Lutz, based on the novel by Nicolas Mathieu, is released. Charrier plays a supporting role at the edge of a love chronicle that looks at the Vosges without nostalgia. On television, France 2 launches La Vallée fracturée on September 22 and 29, then October 6, 2025, a miniseries in which the actress plays a mayor caught in a territorial conflict at the time of drilling and environmental anger, available in full on France.tv. The season began earlier in the year with Haut les cœurs, a TV film awarded at the Luchon Festival on February 8, 2025 with the Best Single Drama prize and the Audience Award.
And since the stage enjoys the permeability of the airwaves, Anne Charrier appears on France Inter on September 26, 2025 on ‘La Bande originale’, where Oldelaf contributes a segment. It’s a way to cross audiences and remind that a show is also told outside its walls. Moreover, it can happen at lunchtime.
From The Spectator’s Height: Empathy Without Pathos
What makes Rose Royal strong is its human stance. Romane Bohringer adopts Rose’s gaze without excusing it, and Anne Charrier advances uncovered. The show does not moralize, it observes. It scrutinizes the desire for control, up to buying a weapon to soothe fear. It also explores the gearing of a passion that ends up governing everything. Nothing is spectacular, everything is meaningful: a way of standing, a pushed-back strand of hair, a sudden silence too long.
Psychotherapist Anne-Clotilde Ziégler, occasionally brought into the project, provides a discreet counterpoint: to talk about control without over-psychologizing, to recall the porous border between choice and constraint, to invite listening. The stage never becomes a platform; it remains theater, that is, a place of managed emotions, a danger domesticated by form. In the auditorium, you can feel the breaths synchronizing. The light falls, the blackout ends, and yet the unease persists, like a stubborn scent.
The Workshop Work: Scenography, Lighting, Costumes, Music
You leave the Studio remembering a scenography as trace more than set. Also retained is a light that cuts without crushing and costumes that tell a biography in three tones. Additionally noticed is a music that favors suggestion over effect. The deliberately reduced setup sticks to the point. Moreover, emotional dependence is heard more clearly when you remove the noise. Also, the quest for control becomes clearer this way. Furthermore, the obsession with sign is also distinguished in this silence. Theater becomes a laboratory of perception, and Anne Charrier is its patient operator.
This economy of means also matches the spirit of the times. It evokes a scene that, after years of budgetary uncertainty, relearns simplicity. It also claims lightweight formats, which the Festival Off audience largely applauded. In that logic, Rose Royal sits in a virtuous wake: less set, more listening, a more direct, almost ecological, relation to the narrative.
Rumors, Name Confusions And Precision Of Facts
As a reminder, no family link connects Anne Charrier to Brigitte Bardot. The confusion comes from a name similarity with Anna Charrier, whose name circulated in the approximate genealogies of social networks. However, the actress continues on her path, far from borrowed mythologies. She remains faithful to this underground work that eventually emerges into daylight.
On another level, precision matters. The Parisian run of Rose Royal extends over more than three months, at the Studio de la Comédie des Champs-Élysées. It offers regular times and a running time of 1 H 15. It is within this tightly framed context that the show leaves the feeling of a dangerous freedom. You may know the outcome, but the trajectory keeps its bite. Theater reminds us that one can go very far with little, provided the direction holds the arc. Also, it is essential that the actress agrees to expose herself there.