Little Theatre from The End of The World: Opus III

The landscape evokes Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”—but while the film marks the dawn of big industry, here we witness its twilight. The imagery is strikingly similar: blood, sweat, and tears shadowed by money, success, and exploitation.

In a white space with cloth-covered tables, three masterful actor-puppeteers and the audience gather around this fragile fragment of an iron, coal, and oil civilisation, conjured on stage in an instant. At the heart of this rusty yet still potent industrial machinery—a tiny man, wandering aimlessly through a labyrinth of time and space. A solitary, resigned, and burnt-out figure.

Though just a fleeting moment in Ezéquiel Garcia-Romeu’s performance, it perfectly distills the essence and power of Théâtre de la Massue. The director’s biographical note describes him as a puppeteer, set designer, artistic director, and fittingly, a ‘creator of worlds.’ Anyone familiar with even a glimpse of Garcia-Romeu’s work knows this to be true. His theatre is both total in scope and strikingly intimate.

The trilogy of “The Little Theatre from the End of the World”, culminating in the performance “Opus III” presented in Wrocław, is an installation-performance sitting at the crossroads of contemporary art and puppet theatre. Despite its title conjuring images of far-off lands, it speaks directly of our world—the utopian dream of building a better place, here and now, at the bitter end of human hopes twisted into disaster.

Literary inspiration springs from the works of leftist thinkers Robert Linhart, Simone Weil, and Leslie Kaplan, who often mined their personal experiences to deliver raw, in-depth portraits of workers and factory life.

The dramaturgy hinges on the evocative power of memory. Laurent Caillon, the playwright of “Opus III”, writes: “I think that this approach rests on a notion that is essential for me here, which is the absence. It is this idea of absence that gives its meaning to the notion of memory which is at play here. The ruin relates a past time, and what was going on at this time, but blurred, warped, in fragments, more or less resounding, more or less vivid, leaving to each member of the audience its part of interpretation… Here the industrial ruin relates that it was, that it still is, the place of faith of triumphant capitalism.

As opposed to ancient ruins which tranquilly relate a time that has passed, and which are subject to a comforting romanticism, industrial ruins are obviously much more recent, but their materials are not stone anymore, but iron, plastic; they are not white anymore but dark, rusted: the industrial ruin relates an abandon, a stop to something that was produced, a presence that is gone. It is a strange witness who became totally silent. 

A vertiginous whirlwind of nations, cultures, societies destroyed, shattered, devastated, that misery and the global expansion of capitalism reduced to crumbs, in the multiple drain channels of the labour force… Who will ever be able to recount it, this long march which, one by one, grabbed you and threw you into specialized or manual work…”