Upcoming:
The Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, with the Métamorphoses Association, Bretteville-sur-Odon, 2027.
Abysses, group exhibition with the Dire Autrement collective, La Bouée, Cherbourg, 2027.
Un homme est agenouillé au centre de la scène. Autour de lui gravite son âme, un fou qui l'interroge, le provoque et le harcèle sans relâche. Entre éclats de rire, visions cosmiques, désir, nihilisme et poésie, les deux voix s'affrontent dans une plongée vertigineuse au cœur de la conscience humaine. Peu à peu, les frontières entre le corps, l'âme, le spectateur et le néant se dissolvent, jusqu'à faire de la scène elle-même un espace où chacun devient le témoin de sa propre folie.
À travers une fantaisie baroque, Nihil Delirium met en scène les rouages de la perversion narcissique en faisant d'Éros et de Thanatos non des pulsions à célébrer, mais des motifs symboliques que le théâtre transforme en jeu, en vertige et en poésie.
The praise of folly, NIHIL DELIRIUM
A man is kneeling at the centre of the stage. Around him circles his soul, a madman who questions him, provokes him, and relentlessly hounds him. Between bursts of laughter, cosmic visions, desire, nihilism, and poetry, the two voices clash in a dizzying descent into the heart of human consciousness. Little by little, the boundaries between body, soul, spectator, and nothingness dissolve, until the stage itself becomes a space in which everyone becomes a witness to their own madness.
Through a baroque fantasy, Nihil Delirium stages the mechanisms of narcissistic perversion, transforming Eros and Thanatos not into drives to be celebrated, but into symbolic motifs that theatre turns into play, vertigo, and poetry.
A little analysis, in case you didn’t understand anything
Nihil Delirium is a long dramatic poem that stages not a dialogue between two characters, but the inner schism of a single being. The Fool, who proclaims himself to be the man’s soul, acts as a tyrannical conscience: he constantly shifts between tormentor, confidant, lover-double, and tempter. This relationship creates a theatrical tension in which madness is never presented as a pathology, but as an excessive lucidity in the face of the absurdity of existence.
The writing intertwines sensual lyricism with a deeply existential philosophical reflection. The text moves through themes of emptiness, death, desire, gender, war, and creation, in a language where cosmic imagery sits alongside insults, flashes of humour, and references to Baudelaire, Dante, and the myth of Adam and Eve. This verbal profusion mirrors the very acceleration of thought, as though delirium itself were becoming a form of poetry.
One of the play’s most compelling aspects lies in its relationship with the audience: the spectator gradually ceases to be an outside observer and becomes a silent character, accused, watched, and eventually identified as the true “nothing”. The stage then becomes a mirror in which each person is confronted with their own presence, their own silence, and the vertiginous question of what it means to live. Thus, Nihil Delirium does not seek to answer nihilism: it transforms it into a theatrical experience, in which language struggles, right up to the final word, against the pull of nothingness.
The final scene does not celebrate death, but a symbolic erasure. To become “nothing” is to be reduced to the negation of oneself through a discourse of domination, while simultaneously revealing the power of theatre itself: to make a being disappear through words, like an illusionist performing his final trick. In this way, Nihil Delirium transforms the experience of coercive control into a philosophical fantasy, in which the vertigo of nothingness paradoxically becomes an act of creation.
Delirium is never merely destructive. It is also an aesthetic, a freedom of language, and a way of resisting reality by reinventing it.