Julien Gosselin
Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
Extinction

[Theatre]

In tackling one of Thomas Bernhard's masterpieces, the director has chosen to situate it in perspective, in the form of a triptych made up of a toing and froing between past and present. Vienna appears, both an extremely refined one and also one that is on the verge of Arthur Schnitzler’s apocalypse.

After focusing on contemporary authors for a considerable length of time, Julien Gosselin now turns to an exploration of European modernity. The playwright and director compares this change of direction towards a near past, to a visit to the ruins of Pompeii during which the matter in hand would not only be that of exhuming the bodies buried under the ashes, but also of confronting them with our present. Thus, in order to transpose Thomas Bernhard's novel Extinction to the theatre, using German and French performers, he bathes the audience in the sounds of an electro-filled evening in which the dancers gyrate and move around, before transporting them to Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna. Filmed live, this vision of a carefree old Europe, taken up with the questions of Freud and Mahler, and with the perspective of the catastrophe of the two world wars running in the background, is followed by the intervention of a woman we saw dancing a little earlier. She talks about literature. Next, there is a phone call about a car accident. And so begins Thomas Bernhard's novel.