Solstice d'hiver (Winter Solstice)

It’s Christmas Eve. A bourgeois apartment. Inside, Bettina is annoyed: her mother has invited a stranger she met on the train. An odd music aficionado with impeccable manners from a bygone era who proves to be both fascinating and astonishing, yet arouses suspicions, visions and panic.

Published in 2007, before the emergence of today’s known right-wing leaders, Solstice d’hiver lays bare the imminent dangers of the rise of extremism. This caustic comedy is a biting critique of a Western World preoccupied more with its comforts than with ensuring its survival. The obliviousness of its characters reflects a society that has allowed itself to be seduced by a numbing status quo.

The work captivates by its form and its content. The writing borrows from film with its recurring leaps in time. It is precisely this dizzying narrative structure, as well as the themes it carries, that inspired Joël Beddows to stage this script, which lies at the intersection of theatre, essay, novel and cinema. “This project allows me to channel my own rage against present political apathy or the absence of nuanced political thought,” he explains.