Documentation > Archives past Seasons > The Past Seasons > Season 2007- 2008

Riddle : what is Maeterlinck ? Answer : Marthaler. In other words, a unique mixture of humor, melancholy, critical lucidity and childlike insouciance. And on top of it, extraordinary actors, a collection of somewhat lost, clumsy, solitary beings, who actually are together without being together, wearing pearl gray nylon or flowered percaline, « patient workers», lost in thought in the corner of a decrepit, garment sweatshop, where foremen who « embarrass the idea of work itself, shove, push, are pushed and shoved, dazed and stunned, full of themselves and bubbling with scatterbrained disdain but without ill intentions ». People that we would think were taciturn, if they didn't suddenly perform comical or sublime musical numbers, such as a Dutch pop song, or one of Purcell's lamentos. As for Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck - poet, playwright and impassioned observer of all kinds of social insects - , he is the one, whose dozens of works (from Pelléas to the Trésor des humbles), haunt our Marthaler, under the following epigraph : « A great number of our thoughts, attack our souls from the rear!"