« I will look at you no more. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks. »

Oscar Wilde, Salome

Madame speaks of a woman, a “madwoman.” She's a “family madwoman,” a “neighborhood madwoman.” Madame explores a form of “madness” on the margins of “normality,” on its tipping point, on the very edge of their dividing line.

Madame is a fragmented figure, a kaleidoscopic image, a character who splits and proliferates, who is transformed, who twists and turns, who exposes and over-exposes herself.

In this theater piece, three performers play this allegorical figure who never represents what one might think. They embody images-fictions that alternately comical and disquieting, distant and familiar, terrifying and fascinating.

These three reflections of Madame appear and disappear in a scenic space where the fictional and symbolic dimensions are constantly disrupted and broken by the return in “the real,” by the address to the audience, and by deliberately putting everyday situations at risk. A linear reading is impossible: like the fragmented representations of the character, the construction of the play is presented as a fiction in pieces.

This gives rise to multiple facets of her “brilliance,” and to projections of the images she invents and which run through her: a fallen siren, a star in decline, a young contemporary woman who takes on the voice of a punk from the 80s, a “family madwoman” who speaks up, a wild animal with a melancholy gaze, an ageless Salomé...

It’s often uncertain what Madame is talking about or what she's telling us. But, after all, isn’t that her role? To take us to places where our representations are troubled and where meaning escapes us? After all, it's up to us whether we follow her for a spell wherever she might take us.