PHÈDRE
Forbidden passion. A dark enclosed milieu rife with dark compulsions is soon beset by a punitive people. How to escape the gaze of the Other? A modern-day Phaedra, with Marie Brassard in the leading role.
PASSION UNDER SURVEILLANCE
A woman tormented by irrepressible urges. A father and a son both subject to the ravages of passion. A dark enclosed milieu beset by a punitive people. Consumed by forbidden desire, Phèdre falls prey to public condemnation. In a society where everyone spies on everyone else, how to escape the judgement of the crowd? Can our inner turmoil and transgressions be concealed from the gaze of the Other? Nourished by the imaginations of Euripides, Seneca, Racine and Sarah Kane, this powerful reworking of the myth of Phaedra is anchored in the current era, in its zones of uncertainty, its decadence.
After dazzling festivalgoers in 2010 with the pungent poetry of Cendres, the brilliant writer and director Jérémie Niel, a rigorous explorer of the inexpressible, is back with a hypnotic piece. In a setting rife with dark compulsions and by means of words piercing through the silence, the intimate and the social come clashing together.
PRODUCED BY PÉTRUS
CONCEIVED AND DIRECTED BY JÉRÉMIE NIEL
PERFORMED BY MARIE BRASSARD + BENOÎT LACHAMBRE + EMMANUEL SCHWARTZ + MANI SOLEYMANLOU
MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN TOMAS FUREY
LIGHTING DESIGN ERWANN BERNARD
SET DESIGN JASMINE CATUDAL
DRAMATURG JESSIE MILL
COSTUME DESIGN RENATA MORALES
COPRODUCTION FESTIVAL TRANSAMÉRIQUES + THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS OF THE CANADA’S NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE (OTTAWA)
CREATIVE RESIDENCY CINQUIÈME SALLE
PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH CINQUIÈME SALLE
WRITTEN BY CATHERINE CYR
TRANSLATED BY NEIL KROETSCH
PREMIERED AT FESTIVAL TRANSAMÉRIQUES, MAY 26, 2014
JÉRÉMIE NIEL | PÉTRUS (MONTRÉAL)
Theatre of the Inexpressible
For the past few years Jérémie Niel has occupied a unique place in the Quebec theatrical landscape. The brilliant writer and director, who studied at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal (2002-2003), founded his own production company Pétrus in 2005. He has pursued, within its flexible structure and in a number of striking plays, a rigorous approach of formal exploration that invokes the spectator’s aesthetics and sensorial awareness. Sculpting shadowy light and presenting, in a distended temporality, stunning soundscapes interspersed with silence, he turns each piece into a hypnotic universe suffused with a subdued strangeness. A poet of a quirky, off-beat reality, he endeavours, in probing the underside of words, to reveal the zones of ambiguity and uncertainty that lurk in the human psyche.
