Quai d’Angers

An exceptional director, Daniel Jeanneteau explores human passions through three short plays by an unusual German author.

The theatrical careers of Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma have included productions of works by August Strindberg, Sarah Kane and Boulgakov. In their current production, they will be introducing us to an early 20th century author named August Stramm, who was a postal administrator and held himself aloof from literary and theatrical circles. Called up in 1915, he died on the Russian front later that year after having completed his final play Geschehen ("Fate").
Stramm work, which was not published until 1914 (when it began appearing in the magazine Der Sturm), has been largely ignored by theatre historians. He was curious about everything, and influenced by naturalism, symbolism, expressionism, and the then new discipline of psychoanalysis; he was an explorer who constantly shifted from one territory to another. The strangeness of his work results from the marriage effected there between the extreme poetic elaboration of language and the concrete, carnal, and realistic nature of the situations presented in his plays.
In the three short pieces to be presented here (in the order in which they were written), we move from the ferocious humor of Rudimentaire to the symbolism of La fiancée des Landes to the implacable cruelty of the unspoken in Forces.

In these plays, Stramm is an uncompromising observer of the desire, jealousy and neurosis that make people tick. Use of the same set and same actors for all three plays ramps up the tone in this laboratory of human behavior.