• From Thursday 5 to Friday 6 November 2009 - 20h30
• Saturday 7 November 2009 - 20h30
• From Tuesday 10 to Saturday 14 November 2009 - 20h30
• Sunday 15 November 2009 - 15h00
• From Tuesday 17 to Saturday 21 November 2009 - 20h30

A palimpsest
Heiner Müller’s Philoctetes is not an adaptation of the Greek play but a palimpsest which erases and covers the original work, and lets it seep through like in an x-ray picture. Francis Bacon and Picasso used the same process with paintings by Velasquez.

A Philoctetes without God(s)
In this Philoctetes there is no chorus, no deus ex machina, no sudden appearance of Heracles that would make a happy ending possible. This is a Philoctetes without God(s). Heiner Müller does not compete with Sophocles, he breaks down, destroys and deconstructs the tragic mould, the Greek statuary devised by the German philosophers who, in the early 19th century, invented the Germans’ Greece, which was meant to rival the Greece contrived by Racine and the French. Müller complexifies the radical form of theatre Brecht had used in the early 1930ies, the “Lehrstück” which, with Müller, is akin to Artaud’s “théâtre de la cruauté”.

Jean Jourdheuil