ARCHIVES 2015 / Soudain la nuit

The product of a collective work begun three years ago by the Compagnie du Zieu, Suddenly the Night is the third and final part of a cycle called Spectres of Europe. This play focuses on the figure of the foreigner, apparently split into two roles: that of an Arab doctor, Dr. Chahine, who heads the medical wing of a European airport, and that of a young man, an Arab whose sudden and unexplained death feeds the health and security fantasies of a continent already on the defensive. The airport, a place of transit, exchange, and separation, becomes for the night a place of waiting, where time is like suspended. The contradictions and ghosts that all carry within themselves, passengers and health professionals alike, turn out to be contagious. In the silence of the night, knives are sharpened, words spread like wildfire. With this play, Nathalie Garraud and Olivier Saccomano continue with the actors and technicians of their company an experiment that is at once a radiography of modern ideologies and the discovery of a collective dramatic gesture that explores the active and expressive possibilities of their art.

Nathalie Garraud, director, and Olivier Saccomano, playwright, continue the work they started in 2006 with the Compagnie du Zieu, an original dramatic project based on thematic cycles. After The Suppliants, a cycle on tragedy (2007-2010), It's Good, It's Bad, a cycle on youth (2010-2013), they began a cycle revolving around the figure on the foreigner, called Spectres of Europe (2013-2015). After two short plays, which they call study plays, The Benefits of Spring, rehearsed and created during their time as artists-in-residence at the FabricA in November 2013, and Othello, Variation for three actors, which played last year at the Festival d'Avignon, Nathalie Garraud and Olivier Saccomano will present Suddenly the Night to close this cycle. Their work with the company plays an integral part in the creation of the play, and they see their unique writing style as a constant dialogue with the times, in which poetics and politics are inseparable. The text and the stage are to them the setting of a collective research about dramatic writing and the practice of the actor, as well as of an experiment in collective thinking.