The characters have an air of déjà vu. They move through an overwhelmed police station, an asylum, a nursing home, the metro, an elevator, a theater stage, a sandbox or a psychiatric hospital. The series of places does not stop there.
Created in Charenton-le-Pont, Mathilda May’s sixth show thus brings together material already tested before audiences: brief stories, recognizable lives, and an everyday existence that the stage scrolls through rather than the phone.
Actress, author and director, she stages human beings battered by everyday life. The show focuses on those ordinary lives that day-to-day existence wears down, jostles or sidelines.
The device rests on a simple shift. Instead of “scrolling” on a mobile phone, the actress, author and director “scrolls” in the theater, stringing together these slices of life.
Mathilda May has concocted everyday sketches, funny and sad at once. These fragments do not lapse into an absurdity detached from reality: they remain, in the critic’s phrase, “not so absurd after all.”.