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.

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

Armando, the narrator's alter ego, is unable to complete his project to build a watermill to irrigate his vegetable garden. His search for a solution leads him to meet the residents of his neighbourhood and recount their stories, which paint a picture of lives not yet alienated, neighbourhood celebrations and funerals, love and betrayal, everyday existence and dreams. In particular, on this day, the funeral of Stevanato is being celebrated, a former worker who, along with other retirees, had created a community workshop in the church basement to serve the neighbourhood, where anything and everything could be repaired. The engineering project designed to make the statue of St Joseph in the church cry will provide Armando with the solution to make his mill work: he was missing a helical gear mechanism, the famous “vite senza fine” (endless screw).

Not specified

Brunello Gigio

Molnár Gyula (aka Giulio Molnár)

Italy

Mogliano Veneto

Italy (north)

Workers’ memory

Worker

Church

People

District

Realist

Italian

Storie del secolo scorso

Postman

Grandmother

Priest

Husband

Engineer

Narrator

Alternating narrative / dialogue

Domestic scene

Avista

Light effects

Letter

Popular speech

Story

Procession

Love rivalry

Narrative Theater

Vite senza fine

Vis sans fin

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.