Le Paradoxe de John

LE PARADOXE DE JOHN Philippe Quesne’s new production gathers a small, faintly oddball troupe to weigh up – with humour and melancholy – the place of art in our daily lives. Its libretto is built from original texts by the poet and novelist Laura Vazquez. The piece is a companion to one of Quesne’s most celebrated works, The Serge Effect (2008), seen by Pilsen festival audiences in 2014. That show followed a solitary man who, every Sunday, mounted a little theatre performance for his friends in his flat. Out of his three-minute miniatures, full of ingenious and peculiar special effects, grew something poetic and funny – but also a strange place where the loneliness of a melancholy inventor met the warmth of his circle of patient onlookers. The same tension, between dogged private enquiry and the urge to share it, now plays out among a group of friends who meet every Thursday to run an art gallery. Somewhere between effect and paradox lies the spirit of a theatre that keeps close to its audience, drawing them in as witnesses to a polyphonic composition for humans and non-humans alike, to an imaginative world at once visual and literary.

The cast positively crackles as it breathes life into the “Quesne spirit” – somewhere between absurdity and reality, irony and poetry, yet always brimming with an irrepressible humanity.
VINCENT BOUQUET, Sceneweb

Philippe Quesne, ever the visual artist, turns the stage into a real (and beautiful) artist’s studio.
FABIENNE PASCAUD, Télérama

Le paradoxe de John is a wonderful production, utterly typical of Quesne; his creative method is a performative current that flows gently towards a tender absurdity.
AMÉLIE BLAUSTEIN-NIDDAM, Cult. News

Philippe Quesne comes to theatre as a visual artist, and he wants not merely to depict the act of making but to make for real – in a deeply satisfying, comic, liberating excess.
LUCILE COMMEAUX, Libération

PHILIPPE QUESNE (1970) Director, set designer and playwright. After studying fine art at the École Estienne and the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he spent some ten years as a set designer on theatre and opera productions and contemporary art exhibitions. In 2003 he founded Vivarium Studio, a company of actors, visual artists and musicians. Its productions have been touring the world for years: La Démangeaison des ailes (2003), Des Expériences (2004), D’après nature (2006), L’Effet de Serge (2007), La Mélancolie des dragons (2008), Big Bang (2010), Swamp Club (2013) and more. He has also published four books on the relationship between people and nature: Actions en milieu naturel (2005), Petites réflexions sur la présence de la nature en milieu urbain (2006), Thinking About the End of the World in Costumes by the Sea (2009), Bivouac (2011). As a director he has worked in Japan, Belgium and Germany, where his productions include Caspar Western Friedrich (2016) at the Schauspielhaus in Hannover, Farm Fatale (2019) at the Münchner Kammerspiele and Cosmic Drama at Theater Basel (2021). In opera he has staged Usher by Debussy and Annelies van Parys at the Staatsoper Berlin (2018) and Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler at the Wiener Festwochen (2021). From 2012 to 2014 he was an artistic associate of the Théâtre de Gennevilliers under Pascal Rambert, curating its young-artists festival. From 2014 to 2020 he ran the Centre dramatique national Nanterre-Amandiers, where he created Le Théâtre des négociations (2015) – a staged simulation of a global climate summit, made with the sociologist Bruno Latour and his team and two hundred students – along with La Nuit des taupes / Welcome to Caveland (2016) and Crash Park, la vie d’une île (2018). In 2019 he represented France at the Prague Quadrennial, where his installation Microcosm won the main award. Since 2022 he has been artistic director of the Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, home to Les Inaccoutumés, his festival of dance and performance. His most recent work includes: Fantasmagoria, pièce pour pianos & fantômes (2022), made with the composer Pierre Desprats, Le Jardin des délices (2023), presented at the Avignon Festival, and Chroniken vom Mars (2024), after Ray Bradbury, made with Theater Basel. In 2025 he staged Vampires Mountain at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, and in spring 2026 his latest production to date, Spooky Paradise, premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne.