"Phantasmagoria" by Philippe Quesne

Seen at Centre Pompidou Paris on 6 November 2022

One of my greatest regrets ever is not to have seen Philippe Quesne's "La nuit des taupes" on stage. It is also one of the few plays I ever watched online and the only one I truly enjoyed even without being present in the audience. But what impressed me most was the curtain call when the enormous fluffy moles (animals, not skin grows...) who had been living their weird and wonderful lives on stage for an hour and a half came to the front and took their mole heads off to reveal exhausted sweaty actors inside.

Yesterday I finally saw a Philippe Quesne play live for the first time, Phantasmagoria at the Centre Pompidou. Of course it was in no way a "play" in any conventional sense of the world, but the French 'spectacle' describes it perfectly. It was about spirits inhabiting a desolate and magical place, a sort of cemetery of forgotten pianos (take it or leave it, that's what it was). 60 straight minutes of wonder, a sort of meditation exercise that takes you out of your ordinary life without necessarily placing you in a concrete or defined narrative or story. And, of course, where in "La nuit des taupes" there were real life people hidden inside the fabulous yet anonymous figures, here there were plenty of characters but not a single actor. And at the end, the spirits came to the curtain call.