"Cercles/Fictions" by Joël Pommerat

A text about the tamed beast called the ‘European’. The winner of the coveted Molière Prize in 2010, the play shook French audiences when Peter Brook invited Pommerat to stage it at Paris’s Bouffes du Nord theatre.

Everyday European tableaux from the Middle Ages to the present; starring simple folk and knights, servants and masters, lovers and family men, the vignettes all share a socio-political critique and metaphysical gaze, cutting humor and suspense.

Pommerat’s subject is the devaluation of Europe’s great cultural heritage: humanism. The Kanigunda company stages the work as a bizarre chamber circus and ask: how much humanism is left in this amoral Europe of capital markets? Auschwitz? The poverty and deprivation of our metropolises? Consumption? Piety? The rise and fall of the Euro? Eight actors enact over forty roles in an on-stage dream-fantasy played out to music by Ligeti.