La campagne
“A shadowy thriller”
- In-person event
- Français
- ≈ 1 hour and 30 minutes · No intermission
The country was their escape hatch, but on a sultry, seemingly endless night, things fall apart. The varnish cracks, the past oozes out, and the truth threatens to erupt with the dawn. Reviving his company’s inaugural play, Jérémie Niel orchestrates a shadowy thriller where amplified whispers resonate in disturbing echoes.
Fleeing a past that they themselves don’t fully understand, Corinne and Richard have traded the hustle and bustle of the city for a more rural setting amid the alders. But the disturbing arrival of a young stranger, Rebecca, in their home in the middle of the night threatens to destroy their fragile equilibrium.
Upstairs in the big house, the children are asleep. In the kitchen, the adults discuss, prevaricate, challenge and plead in hushed tones. In the surrounding gloom are a shawl, syringes, a bag, shoes, a rock—all clues to the nebulous drama that is unfolding. They pretend, clinging miserably to their fiction, to our narrow and brittle lives, turning a deaf ear to the rumblings of the world.
As the founding artistic director of the theatre company Pétrus, Jérémie Niel practises a rigorous process of formal exploration that foregrounds the audience’s sensory response. Sculpting the half-light and deploying, in a dilated temporality, striking sound landscapes interspersed with silences, he turns each production into a hypnotic universe, imbued with a subtle strangeness, that probes the ambiguous and uncertain zones of the human psyche.
- With Delphine Bienvenu, Chloe Giddings and Mathieu Gosselin
- Translation Guillaume Corbeil
- Assistant set designer Simon Guilbault
- Lighting Régis Guyonnet
- Sound design Francis Rossignol
- Video Jérémie Battaglia
- Costumes Fruzsina Lànyi
- Assistant director Ariane Lamarre
- Production director Kevin Bergeron
- Technical director Etienne Boucher-Cazabon
- Adaptation of lighting Anne Catherine Simard-Deraspe
- Produced by Pétrus and Groupe de la Veillée