Massacre ・ Comédie-Française

"Massacre" refers to the slaughter of people or of defenceless animals as well as to a process of psychological or intellectual destruction.

However, as Tommy Milliot points out, it also evokes the name given to the hunting trophy formed by the head and antlers of a deer. The winner of the 2016 Impatience prize for his staging of Frédéric Vossier’s Lotissement [Housing Estate], the young director continues his exploration of contemporary writing here after Winterreise [Winter Trip] by the Norwegian playwright Fredrik Brattberg and The McAlpine Spillway by the American playwright Naomi Wallace, due to be premiered at the 2019 Avignon Festival. For his first collaboration with the Comédie-Française, he has chosen to introduce audiences to the Catalan author Lluïsa Cunillé, a major figure in Catalan and Spanish theatre who has never been performed in France.

Massacre’s confined action makes it a real thriller, a suspenseful, Pinteresque piece according to the director. The play takes place in an isolated hotel, several kilometres from a village that itself seems to be in the process of being deserted. The paths of two women cross here at a pivotal moment in their lives: the first is the owner, about to close her business due to the lack of customers, while the second has booked a room there for the week and intends to stay. Like a ritual, in an atmosphere of troubling strangeness, they meet every evening in the living room. Seemingly ordinary words gradually reveal an inner turmoil, until the unexpected arrival of a man who shatters their precarious balance. An adept of an embodied theatre and a creator of images who leaves a lot to the audience’s imagination, Tommy Milliot celebrates this simple and entrancing writing.

NEW PRODUCTION

Calendar