Fantôme (Dark Side)

Schedule

Thursday 11 July

17:30 - 18:30: La Cathédrale Nord

Friday 12 July

17:30 - 18:30: La Cathédrale Nord

Cie des Ô (FR)

Theatre

The stage is set in a Scottish fair. Two young, amateur actors are about to perform their “Mummers Play”. It is a short folkloric piece where ghosts and legendary kings roam. They tell the same story every year: every character is called up to the scene one by one, two of them engage in combat, and the defeated one comes back as the “doctor’s ghost.”

This year, however, there is a special event happening at the same time as the play: the Scottish Cup finals. It’s a long-awaited event: 22 long years have passed since the Ghosts of Stornoway have made it this far. On stage, the two rascals are impatient, briskly tapping their feet.

In Fantôme (Dark Side), the company Cie des Ô explore childhood and its afflictions. The ghosts that haunt the stage are those of “Homers,” orphans deported in the seventies to the Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland. Beaten, malnourished and unloved, they endured the iron fists of the clergy and lived in bleak, austere homes. Their stories, their history, will take center stage and their lost souls filled with melancholy will be entangled with those of the Ghosts, the imaginary football team venerated by the two boys.

Author Nicolas Turon uses the world of fairy tales, as well as his own childhood with its wounds, to bridge the chasm between the narratives. “When writing, I look for a certain naïveté that is not yet tainted by conventions or principles; one that is free of the weight of adulthood. I draw my inspiration from James Barrie, Lewis Carroll or Roald Dahl.” The actor and his sidekick, musician Fabrice Bez, will draw the viewers into a story that is simple and potent, beautiful and bitter, benevolent and utopian. One could also say that the story is “a prayer that haunts, a celebration of all the lives we were not meant to live.”

Ages 8 and over.

Note: This performance is in French.