Synopsis

The play was originally conceived as a double-barreled fiction based on the real-life story of an eleven-year-old pre-adolescent girl called Jeanne, who was subsequently removed from the rehearsals due to child labor laws.
The show was then recomposed to make this absence the neuralgic center of the piece, and to project onto the stage a hybrid character, neither child nor adult, who tells her own story and enjoys grimacing, excess and the fragmentation of the body.
Jeanne has become this “grown-up child” who plays with age, propriety and preconceived ideas of what little girls should be.
Full of mischief and insolence, she gives free rein to her fantasies, her taste for the obscene and the monstrous, her sense of pleasure and play. Le Grand Sommeil is the true story of a play that will never take place, in which a young woman vampirizes a little girl, and at the same time repays her by making her appear in the slightest suspension point.

Trailer

The Play

Le Grand Sommeil was previewed at Studio Naxos, Frankfurt am Main (Germany), as well as at the Théâtre de La Commune – CDN d’Aubervilliers (France), before the play was performed on the same stage in November 2018.
Since then, this one-woman-show has toured with over 60 performances in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Estonia.
New performances of the play are announced from next January 2025, at the Centre Dramatique National de Gennevilliers, as well as at the Scène Nationale de Cergy-Pontoise.