LA FÊTE

Based on a true story – the death of a Belgian-Senegalese student in December 2018, following an initiation ritual into an elite student circle – they explore the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between the victim’s family and those of two of the convicted men.

In a family home on the Belgian coast, two years after a highly publicised trial that resulted in derisory sentences, the conditions for such a meeting appear to be in place. The victim’s father arrives accompanied by his son, as well as a journalist who has come to document this attempt at dialogue.

But this meeting exists only because it has been staged. On stage, the actors attempt to set out the different versions of events, to invent the words that were never spoken.

Very quickly, the positions become unstable. Who is speaking? From what perspective? Where does fiction begin, and what does it encompass? The dynamic shifts. The encounter becomes a battleground of forces. The actors, like the characters, slip in turn from the role of witness to that of accomplice, victim or judge.

What was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation turns into an impossible repetition: that of a story which persists, which resists, and which demands to be replayed without ever being able to find resolution.

At the crossroads of reality and fiction, *LA FÊTE* highlights the power of narrative and exposes the protective mechanisms of the elites, the denial of racism, the violence of legacies, and the grey areas left by what has not been said, judged or redressed.

The theatre thus becomes a space of friction: a place where we collectively attempt to examine what, in reality, remains irreconcilable.