Monsieur Linh and His Child

With Jules Werner

Director Guy Cassiers Text Philippe Claudel

Adaptation Guy Cassiers

Video Design Klaas Verpoest Sound Design Diederik De Cock Costume Design Tim Van Steenbergen

Co-production Toneelhuis, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg

Dimanche 5 MAI 2019 à 17h00

Lieu: Grand Théâtre / Studio

Mister Linh flees his war-ravaged country in search of a better future for his granddaughter. The devotion he affords the little girl attracts the ridicule of his roommates in the asylum centre. Mister Linh doesn’t feel at home in the foreign land where he finds himself, until one day he meets Mister Bark. Bark talks mainly about his wife who died recently. Mister Linh doesn’t understand him but he listens, his little girl on his lap. They meet on the same bench in the park every day until one day everything changes...

Monsieur Linh and His Child is a moving account of a man forced to escape his country with the little he has left, a man who has to live with his traumatic memories and who can’t let go of the past. Guy Cassiers stages his adaptation of the novella by Philippe Claudel as a monologue. The production will be made in several language versions and in each language, a different local actor will perform.

Following the Flemish premiere in September and the French premiere in March 2018, the English-language version – co-commissioned by Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg – now premieres in Luxembourg starring film and theatre actor Jules Werner. By having Werner perform all the parts - those of the narrator, Mister Linh and Mister Bark - the director gives the production a special flavor, atmosphere and significance. It becomes a performance about the power of imagination and portrayal. But at the same time it is a play about loneliness, about the longing to communicate with others – and not in the last place, with the audience.

Philippe Claudel (1962) is a French author, scriptwriter and film director. He is best known to the general public for the first film he directed himself, I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, 2008), a moving story of a mother who is accused of murder after putting an end to the suffering of her terminally ill six-year-old son. In recent years Claudel has become one of the most important French writers of his generation.

Setting and direction were very interesting. Video design was fantastic. J. Werner was excellent.

I don't think that the problematic of the play was valid. Migration has to done with young persons.