Give me an enemy

On the musical cross-roads of three languages that intermix in this adventure, the comedian André Wilms re-invents himself yet again in German, English and French as inspired doomsayer. Taking over the words of the German poet Heiner Müller, he appears as a powerful orator of our times capable of defying the gods in the classical style of Ajax and take up arms to defend his human brethren.  Between the memory of Sophocle’s play and publicity jargon of today, the scalpel precision of Heiner Müller’s writing invites into his radical collages the phantoms of History and the ghosts of Today to help him asses the battles fought in the twentieth century.  Under the titleGive me an enemy,Mathieu Bauer choses Ajax, a poem that the playwright from Berlin wrote five years after the wall fell in order to stage it and add it to the explosive showcase of his musical theatre.
With Sylvain Cartigny (guitar), Lazare Boghossian (sampler and basse) and Mathieu Bauer (drums, percussions), this trio born of the group Sentimental Bourreau (Sentimental Hangman) distils its music to carry theatrical codes towards performance grounds and to crown André Wilms as rock star playing the role of a ferryman delivering to the audience this most boisterous of all works of poetry.