With his company Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur, Julien Gosselin appeared on the European theatre scene like a lightning strike from a clear sky. In fact the director, who is not yet 30, and who trained at the Théatre de Lille drama school, had the courage to address one of the most controversial novels of contemporary French literature. Les Particules élémentaires by Michel Houellebecq.
Lauded by the public and the press, the result of this ambitious work is a show lasting more than three hours in which the enfant prodige embraces the author’s language to translate it into a rich scenic vocabulary. Ten actors take on the roles of characters from the novel, as well as commentators, narrators and musicians, accompanied by electric guitars and real-time video.
Bruno and Michel, the first constantly searching for love, the second terrorised of it, are the protagonists of Houllebecq’s novel and the starting point for a ruthless portrayal of Western society that since 1968 has been drawing closer to a science fiction-like yet sterile future. Gosselin accompanies us through this scenario with freshness and wisdom suspended between irony and lyricism, sex, discos and yoga lessons, cynicism and furious poetry.
