Arsen & Fanfan

 The two characters are plugged into wall sockets. Only a few metres separate them. As he chats with Fanfan about this and that, Arsen fiddles with a rubber band. Until he sends it flying. Fanfan kindly goes to pick it up but in doing so accidentally disconnects himself … and dies on the spot.

But this tragic ending is only the beginning. The beginning of a sequel full of humour, magic, plugging and unplugging, characters who see into the future and know the past, surrealism and evocations of space. Throughout, Arsen & Fanfan play mischievously with the ephemeral, with mortality and the idea that ‘all of a sudden, it’s over’.

Art is a game and games are art. Faced with the finitude of our existence and of the entire universe, finding meaning for Simon Thomas seems only possible in art and games. And humour, because humour is also a game. And an art. 

A rising star on the French-speaking Belgian scene, Simon Thomas is known for his cartoonish universe that flirts with the absurd. A world where the rules of communication are often abruptly thwarted, moving away from realism to embrace a playfulness and strangeness that can cast humanity in a new light – and leave the audience free to make their own way, somewhere between laughter and emotion. Since Char d’assaut and Should I stay or should I stay as well as Stanley: small choice in rotten apples, Simon Thomas has built up a colourful and unusual body of work in which the rules of reality are pushed back.

Coproduction Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles