GAZ. Plaidoyer d'une mère Damnée

Tom Lanoye’s first theatre monologue - Gaz. Plaidoyer d’une mère damnée (Gas. Plea for a Damned Mother) - was written for the actress, Viviane De Muynck, and her director, Piet Arfeuille.

A terrorist has blown himself up in the midst of passers-by, although his true motivations are never known. Afterwards, his mother, a simple-hearted woman, retraces her life through that of her son: cesarean birth—blood spilled even
back then!—voracious appetite, greed, insatiable need for approval and for a sense of self…
Present at the scene, the exploding gas provides a link between the 1914-18 war, the use of mustard gas at the Battle of the Yser and the murderous zeal of terrorist attacks today.

In the humble, precise words of this Brechtian-sounding mother, her son rekindles the inflammatory madness of the main figure in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Erostratus, who jealously set fire to the tower in Ephesus merely to be remembered for longer than its architect.

Fame achieved through crime, so to speak…