Et puis, quand le jour s'est levé, je me suis endormie

And when the sun came up, I fell asleep

Why did I leave the path of life already mapped out for me: kindergarten, school, university, psychology studies, marriage to a young lawyer, heir to a savoury biscuit factory, three children, a second home at Saint-Cyr-Les-Lecques, Tupperware parties...?

Why?

Yes, why?

How did I come to be standing under arc lights in a negligée?

This wasn't exactly the life I had imagined!

When Ray said that I was born to go on the stage. That I had to go to Paris. That I would be a triumph.

Dream on!

The houses at Santa Monica, private jets, tours with the Bolshoi, grand receptions at the Canadian Embassy? I never even got the slightest whiff of them.

Instead of that, my mouth was done in and my hands smelt of fish.

When the lead-singer of the pastiche-performing group Les Immondices decided he wanted to stay on stage longer than the usual ten-minute cabaret number, he wrote a long play with his friends and performed it twice in a rented hall; this was Les Brosses: Marseille, 1969. Serge Valletti, born in 1951, had started his life in the theatre, and never would he stop.
In Paris at the effervescent height of emerging young theatre, he was an actor in the troupe led by Daniel Mesguich in a dozen brilliantly insolent shows such as Le Prince Travesti (1974), Remembrances d'amour (1975), Hamlet (1977).
Valletti returned to writing with Au-delà du Rio in 1976 and continued with a series of five duos, a mix of fantasy and news items, that he took all over France, performing with Jacqueline Darrigade.
After a long tête-à-tête with Beckett's Malone Dies, he decided to lay himself open to critical regard and wrote a solo show. This was the amazing adventure of Balle Perdue, the confessions of a mythomaniac, acted by the light of a candle for two spectators (there were only two seats) from September 1981. At the request of Josyane Horville he revived the show in April 1982 to inaugurate the little Athénée Theatre.
In 1988, for the first time, the editor Christian Bourgois published one of his works, Le Jour se lève, Léopold!, which Chantal Morel created very successfully in Grenoble. He himself recounted his Souvenirs Assassins at the Athénée. Valletti had been discovered.
In 1995, Atalante published his first novel, Pourquoi j'ai jeté ma grand-mère dans le Vieux-Port (Why I threw my grandmother into the Vieux-Port), followed in 1998 by the publication of a new work Et puis, quand le jour s'est levé, je me suis endormie (And then, when the sun came up, I fell asleep).

His website: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/serge.valletti/