Sylvain Creuzevault Le Capital et son Singe

based on Capital by Karl Marx

[Theatre]

Sylvain Creuzevault has become a reference point for artists’ collectives seeking to invent a convivial, political and combative way of shaping today’s theatre. This privileged position stems, in part, from the success of his previous creations, among whose ranks was Notre Terreur (presented at La Colline – théâtre national with Festival d’Automne à Paris in 2009). The show’s coup de force was how it succeeded in grasping a whole chunk of the History of France (more specifically its revolutionary heritage) with a highly original mixture of joyful pleasure, political acrimony, and well-natured ease.

After several months of residency, involving around twenty collaborators, he now presents Le Capital et son Singe. This gigantic monument to the history of ideas, whose adaptation would have perturbed many a director, beckoned Sylvain Creuzevault towards a “hard and fast comedy”. Minus any moralizing, glossy utopia, or treatises on “political theatre”. And with no heroification of the immemorial worker or property owner... No : their standpoint, in the words of this enigmatic director, “is concerned not with a love of mankind but of what devours it”.