Thérèse Claus Philipp Maria
scène de genre

Four centuries separate them, but a bottle of booze brings them together. As they knock it back, Saint Teresa of Avila and Claus von Stauffenberg engage in a debate.

This text grew out of a promise made by the author and director to two of the performers in Les Fortunes de la viande. Here, then, are Marie Bos and Claude Schmitz as Teresa of Avila and Claus von Stauffenberg, respectively: the great sixteenth-century mystic, reformer of the Carmelite Order, and the senior Wehrmacht officer who initiated and perpetrated the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944.

Martine Wijckaert, who ‘entered the theatre as one enters religion’ half a century ago and has since become ‘a punk curator’, orchestrates ‘an extremely boozy encounter between two ectoplasms that have emerged from their respective corridors of time’. Over a bottle of booze, these ‘two great metaphysical beasts’ engage in a philosophical, theological and political debate, ultimately proposing a reconfiguration of a world that is strangely similar to our own, as the director notes – ‘a cynical world that has forgotten the meaning of melancholy’.

Coproduction Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles