While the Father of a rich, bourgeois family is dying at the hospital, his house is being burgled. Pascaline, his help (who has become his wife since he became a widower) laments, but her daughter Sarah is delighted to be relieved of the burden of the memories attached to the objects. A Young Man (the Father’s son) happens to come back that very day after seven years of unexplained absence. Freddy, a young and attractive rogue, arrives the same day to ask his mother Pascaline to give him an explanation for the identity of his father and for the reasons that have led her to abandon him. Pascaline, who behaves like a mother towards the Young Man, rejects Freddy. We learn that she survived the Shoah when she was a child. She pretends to ignore who Freddy’s real father is and she also claims that, after denying her pregnancy, she entrusted her to her sister, who raised him without love in a poor suburb. An alcoholic and a very unstable person, she sees Nazis coming out of the walls, unless that it is Freddy who is manipulating her so that she tells him the truth. Later, Pascaline, drunk, confesses to Freddy we was born out of a short-lived relationship she had with a Maghrebin jazz musician who died during the Algerian War. She ends up accepting his son as a gift from God. Freddy’s attractiveness and the ambiguity of his behaviour reveal both the Young Man’s homosexual desire and Sarah’s need for love, as she was a prisoner of an unconditional love for her own brother, and therefore rejected any kind of sexual intimacy. The Young Man encourages his sister to find happiness with Freddy while he, knowing that she is happy, will be able to transition into the woman he realized he wants to be. The phone rings and the death of the Father is announced. Pascaline goes off to discover the world, encouraging Freddy and Sarah to build a fulfilling life as a couple in the house.

Actor and puppet

Adults

France

Sainte-Marie-la-Mer

Avignon

Printed

Filiation

Identity

Prodigal son

Deportation

Shoah

Alcoholism

Virginity

Father

Mother

Death

Lust

Love

Couple

Brother-sister incest

Sexuality

Transsexuality

Dramatic

Ironic

Humorous

Fantastic

French

Domestic servant

Sister

Virgin

Rogue

Attractive man

Maghrebian

Homosexual

Slaps

Scene in the dark

Hip hop dance

Hallucination

Fall of a character

Scene of recognition

Hidden character

Anges du chaos

Angels of chaos

A human narrator, Giafar the magician, addresses the audience. One of his spirits tells him that he found the pure-hearted child Giafar was looking for. Giafar needed the child to capture the powerful genie of a magic lamp. At a marketplace, the narrator recounts the story of Scheherazade to some children. Among them was Aladdin – the pure-hearted child. Giafar pretends to be his uncle, and then leads Aladdin down into an underground cave to retrieve the magic lamp. But Aladdin does not give it to him, and so Giafar abandons him in the cave. With the help of a magic ring, Aladdin goes back to his mother’s house, bringing with him many precious stones as well as the lamp. He frees the genie, who helps him and his mother earn enough money to support themselves for years. Later, as a grown-up, the Sultan agrees to let Aladdin marry his daughter, thanks to the precious stones he found in the cave. But Giafar the magician finds out that Aladdin is still alive and that he grew rich with the help of the genie. He does everything in his power to retrieve the lamp and the genie. But in the end, Aladdin defeats Giafar. The genie seals him in the lamp and Giafar is doomed to come out only to tell the story of Aladdin to children.