What was the genesis of TAIRE?
I have always had a special fondness for the myth of Antigone. She made a strong impression on me from the age of fourteen, when I studied her in class. I identified with her story, which spoke to me and gave me courage. For this project, I initially wanted to interview teenagers living in marginalised areas or victims of urban segregation, in order to bring their perspectives into dialogue with those of young people of the same age from Palestine—and more specifically from Gaza. The goal was to observe the similarities in their lives, the mirror effects between two realities: on the one hand, places in France abandoned by public services, and on the other, spaces subjected to colonial occupation. But the events of 7 October, 2023, and the genocide of the Palestinian population abruptly put a halt to this project, leaving me in a state of shock. I no longer felt capable or legitimate enough to carry out this show. In the face of this paralysis, the figure of Antigone resurfaced, bringing me back to the feeling of powerlessness I carried around with me back when I was fourteen. I decided to call on her again, this time bringing her to young people in child and adolescent psychiatry services.
Is that how the character of Eden appeared?
Alongside these encounters, I conducted a great deal of research and came across recurring terms: eco-anxiety, fascist-anxiety, as well as the rising number of suicides among girls aged ten to eighteen… I started to look into the subject of depression and mental illness among young people. I organised writing workshops in child and adolescent psychiatry services and came face to face with these children’s reality. I encouraged them to keep journals and to write letters to Antigone. In their writings, I often found a strong sense of sisterhood: they supported her in her choices, in her struggle, and praised her courage. That’s when I reestablished the connection between this project and Palestine, through the invisibility of childhood in humanitarian crises; because this is precisely what is happening in France in 2025. The plight of children in state care in France is a real humanitarian crisis. Eden was born from these encounters. She in a child in the social care system. Her story is almost documentary in nature, reflecting real experiences lived by others. By weaving together her presence and the myth of Antigone, which for me resonates with the Palestinian crisis, a layered dramaturgy began to emerge.
The title of the play, TAIRE, seems to hint at a relationship with silence and unspoken things…
The question of silence has underpinned my work from the very beginning. What’s interesting is its ambivalence. Silence can contain the greatest forms of violence as well as moments of complicity or love. On stage, I try to make these silences become markers of understanding for the audience, to make it possible to hear what is said in what goes unsaid, in the dead ends of communication. It’s something I’m obsessed with at every stage of the creative process. From dramaturgy to directing actors, I search for the sounds and echoes of that silence. Here I tackle that theme through the powerlessness of childhood. What I’ve observed is that this generation is trapped in a world that is being built for them with no regard for their voices. It is impossible for them to be heard. In fact, this injunction to silence can be traced back to the very etymology of the word “enfant” (child in French): infans means “the one who does not speak.” In the show, we navigate between the silence of Eden, who is a victim of the silence of others and lacks the tools to make herself heard, and that of Antigone, whom I’ve reimagined as a deliberately silent figure. She has chosen no longer to participate in the world that is offered to her. She observes it as a spectator, she listens to it, but she no longer takes part in being heard. For me, these two relationships to silence are complementary.
How did you build this dramaturgy that oscillates between the present and ancient tragedy?
I decided to delve into the “gray areas” of this story by going back to Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes. This story takes place before the myth of Antigone and tells of the battle between Eteocles and Polynices, her two brothers. What interested me in this battle were the family dynamics, especially the things left unsaid. Going back to the figure of Oedipus, the cursed father, I realised there was something unarticulated in the destiny of this child who had been abandoned by his parents and taken in by a family who lied to him about his origins. The violence we attribute to Oedipus, namely, incest and parricide, is not solely his doing. Another reading is possible, if one tries to do justice to this child left on his own and pushed, without his consent, into a life of atrocities. This reinterpretation of the myth developed in parallel with my work with children in institutional care, and it was by moving between fiction and reality that the play took shape. Eden’s story, inspired by real lives, echoed Antigone’s mythical genealogy. In my rewriting, there is also a total erasure of Oedipus’s story by Queen Jocasta, so that Thebes may be cleansed of the shame of incest and parricide. This is about rebuilding a state on a state-sponsored lie, which to me strongly resonates with what is happening in Palestine. Here, Polynices becomes the child disqualified from the throne. He is no longer anyone’s brother and is condemned to exile. This is about rehabilitating all the stories at risk of being erased due to fascist distortions and a rewriting of official history.
What form does this rehabilitation take on stage?
We are working with a precise codification of the stage space. On one side, there is the mythological reality of Antigone, which carries the epic dimension of the play—along with an aesthetic and a style of acting inspired by dystopian storytelling. On the other side, there is a very naturalistic, highly contemporary reality, using the language of today’s teenagers. Then there’s the echo of the original project: Arabic is used by the chorus and coryphaeus to relay the voice of the people, that mass whose fate is determined by the choices of the powerful. With this play, I am not trying to denounce, but rather to create something that can be shared. When addressing subjects as touchy as violence against children or fascism, I believe the bare minimum is to be careful. Careful of how the audience listens, so that it becomes possible to be “heard”. To that end, we bring in many elements such as humour, dance, music, singing, sound effects, and even visible, hands-on stagecraft. All of this helps to create a reassuring distance. Of course, the play is about violence, but the goal is to translate it onto the stage, through the movement of sets, through the physical choreography of the actors, in order to make it bearable, so that the audience is free to remain active in their imagination.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux in January 2025.