Vampire's Mountain - Odéon

VAMPIRE'S MOUNTAIN Genre: Contemporary theatre Running time: 1h50 without interval In German, English, Japanese, French and Spanish, surtitled in French.

Before romantic landscapes, a peaceful group of vampires has found refuge and, through music, evokes the twilight of our civilisation, without looking down on it or succumbing to fatalism.

With the actors of the Schauspielhaus Hamburg and the Vivarium Studio, Philippe Quesne draws on the mythical figure of the vampire to examine the strained relationship between humankind and nature.

Before vast trompe-l'oeil landscapes, remnants of an idealised romantic nature, a peaceful group of vampires wanders...

After the melancholy dragons, the nocturnal moles, the poet scarecrows and the music-loving skeletons, Philippe Quesne extends his bestiary to cold-blooded creatures.

True to his utopian worlds in which all conflict is abolished, the director and set designer, master of artificial landscapes, installs in his vivarium a new micro-society.

With the actors of the SchauSpielHaus Hamburg and of his own company, he draws on the mythical figure of the vampire to examine the strained relationship between humankind and nature.

From Stoker's Dracula to Murnau's Nosferatu, from Jim Jarmusch's glamorous vampire to teen movies, Quesne scrutinises this figure as nightmarish as it is seductive, to grasp its essence, both poetic and fantastical.

Blood-thirsty predators, skiers in silver suits, bats in full flight, poets weary of life: the actors explore all its metamorphoses, going so far as to replay the evening of 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, where Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their guests, shut in beneath a sky darkened by the ash of a distant volcano, invented the first great modern dystopias.

At the foot of the mountains, the vampire-alpinists strike up, without looking down on it or succumbing to fatalism, the twilight of a civilisation. Ours?