Sans Tambour

WITH NO FANFARE is an original production, moving with humour, lightness and melancholy along the boundary between theatre and music, where the distinguished French director Samuel Achache explores themes of decline and renewal. He takes us into a house whose inhabitants have suffered the collapse of their relationships – and of the house itself. Together with musical director Florent Hubert and an ensemble of actors and musicians, Achache weaves fragments of songs by the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann into the narrative. The production premiered to great acclaim at the Avignon Festival and has since enjoyed success across Europe. Its staging at Divadlo will be the first presentation of Samuel Achache’s work to Czech audiences.

Over the past decade, Achache has developed a quirky brand of musical theater (…) The company he founded in 2021, La Sourde, employs both musicians and actors, and “With no fanfare” takes advantage of that as it waves compositions by cast member and the musical director, Florent Hubert. (…) The back and forth drama and music lends “With no fanfare” much of its power.
LAURA CAPPELLE, The New York Times

The director Samuel Achache embarks Schumann and his actors in a ritual of breaking and collapsing. A virtuoso band that surfs on all disasters and carries us away (…). Flying masterfully over an avalanche of imbalances, everyone seems to be reborn, like phoenixes, from the chaos.
EMMANUELLE BOUCHEZ, Télérama

Served by an impeccable cast (Léo-Antonin Lutinier, Agathe Peyrat, Sarah Le Picard among others), the show assumes the sometimes disconcerting simplicity of a circus burlesque. (…) The comic vein (…) works at full capacity, and beyond its certain effectiveness, distills on stage the melancholy specific to clowning.
Lucille Commeaux, Libération

SAMUEL ACHACHE (1981) first studied at the Music Academy of the 5th arrondissement in Paris with Bruno Wacrenier and then continued his training at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 2013, he co-directed with Jeanne Candel Deceitful Crocodile / Dido and Æneas, a theatre-opera after Henry Purcell, which won the Molière prize for the best musical show. In 2015, he directed Fugue, for the Avignon Festival. He renewed his collaboration with Jeanne Candel for Orfeo / I died in Arcadia at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and also for The Fall of the House for Festival d’Automne. In 2018, also for Festival d’Automne, he created Chewing Gum Silence with Antonin Tri Hoang, and, in the same year, Songs with l’Ensemble Correspondance – Sébastien Daucé. In 2019, the Vie Breve company takes direction of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium in Paris and it is there that in 2020 he directed The Original after a lost copy, conceived with Marion Bois and Antonin Tri Hoang.

THÉÂTRE DES BOUFFES DU NORD is a legendary French theatre built in Paris in 1876. Initially, theatregoers struggled to find the remote building located in a deprived area on the outskirts of the city. Between 1893 and 1894, director Aurélien Lugné-Poë and his Théâtre de l’Œuvre staged two productions of plays by Henrik Ibsen here. The theatre was closed in 1952 due to its poor technical condition, after years of decline. It reopened in 1974 under the direction of Peter Brook and Micheline Rozan, marking the beginning of a glorious era during which the theatre became one of the most renowned centres of contemporary European theatre. In 2010, Brook handed the Bouffes du Nord over to Olivier Mantei and Olivier Poubelle, who are continuing Brook’s work, creating a dramaturgy that straddles the boundaries between contemporary drama, experimental theatre, and music.