Vampire's Mountain - Odéon

VAMPIRE’S MOUNTAIN Genre: Contemporary Theatre

Show duration: 1h50 without interval

In German, English, Japanese, French, Spanish, surtitled in French

Against romantic backdrops, a peaceful group of vampires has found refuge and, through music, without condescension or fatalism, evokes the twilight of our civilisation. With actors from the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and Vivarium Studio, Philippe Quesne uses the mythical figure of the vampire to question humanity's conflicted relationship with nature. In front of large trompe-l'oeil landscapes, remnants of an idealised romantic nature, a peaceful group of vampires wanders...

After melancholic dragons, nocturnal moles, poetic scarecrows and music-loving skeletons, Philippe Quesne extends his bestiary to include cold-blooded creatures. True to his utopian worlds where all conflict is abolished, the director and set designer – master of artificial landscapes – installs a new micro-society in his vivarium. With actors from the SchauSpielHaus in Hamburg and his company, he uses the mythical figure of the vampire to question humanity's conflicted relationship with nature. From Stoker's Dracula to Murnau's Nosferatu, from Jim Jarmusch's glamorous vampires to teen movies, Quesne scrutinises this figure, as nightmarish as it is seductive, to grasp its poetic and fantastic essence. Bloodthirsty predators, skiers in silver suits, bats in full flight, poets weary of life: the actors explore all its metamorphoses, even re-enacting the 1816 vigil at Villa Diodati in Switzerland, where Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their hosts, cloistered under a sky darkened by the ashes of a distant volcano, invented the first great modern dystopias. At the foot of the mountains, the vampire-mountaineers intone, without condescension or fatalism, the twilight of a civilisation. Ours? For who better than this creature, forever fixed on the edge