Christoph Marthaler - Theater Basel & Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne

This season, theatre-maker Christoph Marthaler, who was born in Zurich, will be on our programme for the eleventh time. He started his career as an oboist and flutist, found himself at Jacques Lecoq’s Paris school at the end of the seventies and became a world-class theatre-maker. His meeting with set designer Anna Viebrock and dramaturge Stephanie Carp in 1991 influenced his career both dramatically and irreversibly. Marthaler's unique style is distinguished by slowness and irony and a scenic poetry embedded in everyday reality. With tenderness, humour and humanity, he shows us ordinary mortals who are victims of existential and relational questions in a damaged world.
In ‘Une île flottante’, a reference to the traditional dessert of whipped egg whites, we meet two families: one speaks French, the other German. The piece is a bitter farce in which the bourgeoisie is ridiculed mercilessly. The sparse script contains excerpts from ‘Un mouton à l'mezzanine’ and ‘La poudre aux yeux’ by the French author Eugène Labiche – the latter in a German translation by Elfriede Jelinek. Lewis Carroll is also quoted. It is only at the end that we hear, as an epilogue, the chants that are so typical of Marthaler. The eight performers are once again quite stunning. Their blown-up characters are woefully ridiculous, clumsy and empty.