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Michelangelo Antonioni once said, ‘So much can be said in silence’. A pioneer of modern cinema, he remains a major author of the interior monologue.

For her first staging at the Comédie-Française, Lorraine de Sagazan has taken up the challenge of creating a show without words in order to explore how the theatre can be a place for expressing the inner state of characters. This is not an adaptation of a screenplay by Antonioni, but an original play inspired by his artistic approach - from the tetralogy based on ‘the disease of feelings’ (L’Avventura, La Nuit, L’Éclipse and Le Désert rouge) to his short stories and unrealized screenplays. The play brings together themes dear to the filmmaker, such as disappearance, the dereliction of feelings and the instability of perception.

The director, who will be a resident of the Villa Médicis in 2022-2023, has a long-standing collaboration with the playwright Guillaume Poix, starting in 2019 with L‘Absence de père, a free adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov, followed by La Vie invisible and Un sacre. For this project, which shakes up theatrical conventions, he has written a number of texts, including interior monologues that were used by the actors and actresses in the preparatory work.

In this way, they have created an immersive show in which the audience follows the plot not through the interpretation of words, but through gestures and glances, while the smallest details become unusually eloquent. Set in a two-front stage, as if in a long sequence shot with a unity of place and time, the show gives spectators the freedom to create their own ‘montage’. As close as possible to the stage, to the bodies and faces of the performers, they track down the expressive richness of their inner landscapes in the secrets of their silences.