Soup and silk

I was born in 1968. I belong to the generation that started to do theatre at the time the Berlin Wall came down…

In the theatre the 80s – sometimes dubbed ’the big money years’ – were epitomized by an often obsessive predilection for the visual aspect and a monumental scenography that all but swallowed up the text and the actors.

Since the early 90s we, together with a few other companies, try to give, once again, the words and the bodies of those who speak them their due. With our scenographers, we create less overwhelming stage settings and we try, with the actors, to re-establish the art of listening after a time when the image reigned supreme.

Ideologically we’re different from those who preceded us because of our less dogmatic approach (some would say, slightly patronisingly, that’s it’s ’apolitical’). While the monumental scenography devices make way for a space where words can once again flourish, ideological beliefs and their parade of solid convictions also crumble, opening the way for certain preoccupations that were banished from the stage for a time. Intimacy, considered for twenty years as bourgeois and shameful by the advocates of ‘the theatre as an awareness tool’, comes to the fore again. Not as a fearful and petty way of escaping the world, but as one of the two pillars providing the theatre with its reason to exist: the theatre materializes where the I and the world meet…

The choice of repertoire was inspired from the start by this ambition to sound out intimacy’s problematic relations with the world. However different all these authors – Strindberg, von Horváth, Adamov, Kalisky, Cormann, and Pourveur – who moreover belong to different eras, they all confront in a highly individual and poetic manner the private to the collective. Their works shun all moralizing simplification, are impossible to explain succinctly, are full of contradictions and ambiguities, are tricky, complex, even ‘impossible to perform’. They confront us with ourselves and our demons, they defy the actors to give a performance as singular as their nature. The voices we like to make heard ignore the old rules of French classicism and don’t hesitate to mix sophistication with triviality, refinement with earthy realism in one and the same play. The theatre may well be the daughter of a spiritual mother, but its father is an inebriated clown who belches in his silk clothes and farts in the soup. Thus is the theatre, thus is the world: immensely precious as well as immensely futile…

Michael Delaunoy

Artistic director l’envers du théâtre