“The Return” is a modern Gothic narrative about Michael and Claire, a young couple going through a divorce, and their improbable journey back to one another, one that disrupts the normal order of the world. Claire works in television and strives to build her career in Paris, while Michael struggles to balance his job in Marseille with his wife’s ambitions in the capital. Their relationship ultimately unravels when Michael embarks on an affair with Cécile Lambal, a young woman barely past adulthood, with whom he maintains a carefree relationship even after the divorce. One night, at a party that had become just another routine for him, Michael dies unexpectedly. As a ghost, he follows his own body on a journey through the labyrinths of chance and the surreal bureaucracy of death, until he is led back to his former wife.
This work, which breaks social taboos, is what the French literary tradition describes as bizzarerie: a strangeness that disrupts the self-evident reality of everyday life. The performance draws on the Gothic motif of an inverted world, echoing the idea that on Judgment Day, the wronged will take revenge on their oppressors. However, in this story, the boundary between justice, punishment, and sacrilegious pleasure is ghostly pale and constantly redrawn. Here, our existential anxieties, shameful desires, and past mistakes are exposed beneath an electric, blinding light.
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