The Trousers

Jean Anouilh’s The Trousers is a farce written in 1978. It seemed to me very interesting to stage today this phantasmagorical nightmare with “Fellinian” accents, oscillating between a cruel joke and a bitter statement of a fallen society loosing its points of reference and moral conscience. Taking the power by force, women who had long suffered the male supremacy which sometimes ruined them, pledge a total and final annihilation of men. Through the carnavalesque ballet of this choral piece performed by picturesque and deeply theatrical characters, the play will denounce the madness of a system that reduces individuals to nothingness and thereby highlight the different strategies of survival instinct that each character develops according to their sex, their socio-professional category, their personal interest. Through humour and sung sketches added in the spirit of the author, we will underscore the sometimes lyrical and at other times cutting oneirism of the piece that portrays the shaky world we live in. To do this we shall set the show in a singular timeless aesthetics that will enliven the Sublime and the Grotesque, Monsters and Wonders that powerfully and poetically coexist throughout Anouilh’s visionary and “cheeky” play.

Emeline Bayart