<p>Monsieur Durand owns a factory and is looking for someone to replace him while he leaves on holidays. He offers the position to Guignol. Because his factory produces blows with a stick, he starts hitting Guignol. Guignol grabs the stick--it is his turn to hit Monsieur Durand, whom he leaves for dead. The Gendarme (policeman) comes in. He tries to seduce Madelon. When he discovers Monsieur Durand’s body, he wants to capture the murderer. Madelon succeeds in making him leave, and she brings Monsieur Durand back to life. The Gendarme comes back but he is driven out once and for all. Monsieur Durand gives Guignol the job.</p>

Glove-puppet

Young audiences

Albert-Birot Pierre

France

Paris

Printed

Wealth

Money

Factory

Seduction

Death resurrected

Corpse

Naivety

Comical

Farcical

French

Guignolade en un acte

Madelon

Constable

Guignol

Address to the public

Blow-with-a-stick

Guignol veut s'enrichir

Guignol wants to become rich

<p>In a former espadrille factory closed for years, abandoned objects, clothes and machines come to life to evoke the forty-five years of life of the factory and its workers. Former workers, former managers, and residents who lived by the rhythm of factory life recall with emotion the hours of hard work interspersed with joy, the strike pickets and union struggles, the resistance to successive factory closures and unemployment. Among them, Jacqueline makes her eight-year-old grandson Ulysse understand the place of the factory in her life. The factory, which was closed and left abandoned for a long time, was finally dismantled and demolished. The day the building is razed to the ground, the whole landscape of the city changes, leaving a gaping void for the inhabitants. The children of the school, worried and disoriented, wonder about this disappearance. The headmaster then asks them to draw the factory as they have always seen it or as they have been told about it, so that they will not forget it. Ulysse offers his drawing to his grandmother Jacqueline to console her: it shows the factory teeming with life, as she knew it. This is how this working-class memory is passed on from one generation to the next.</p>

Object theatre

Actor and puppet

All audiences

Chaffin François

Oloron-Sainte-Marie

Workers’ memory

Industrial past

Remembrance

Machine

Testify

Labour

Pathetic

Lyrical

Des voix sortant des penderies de vestiaire

Voice

Worker

Ouvrière

Patron

Hand

Le dernier ouvrier de la dernière espadrille

Bird

Grandmother

Child

Metonymy (mode of characterisation)

Chorality

Chorus

Ni bleu ni blouse

Neither blue nor blouse work clothes