Pétrole at the Odéon:
Cinema, Tragedy, and the Saint of the Defeated
With Pétrole, Sylvain Creuzevault doesn’t stage a novel—he stages a live shooting of Pasolini’s worldview.
The Odéon becomes a film set, a confession booth, and a judicial autopsy of modern man.
Spectators don’t watch a play; they witness a Pasolinian camera dissecting the human soul in real time.
From the opening minutes, the aesthetic is unmistakable.
Like Medeea, Teorema, or Salò, the production rejects psychological comfort and narrative smoothing.
Instead, it exposes the world as Pasolini understood it: violent, political, mystical, erotic, and always merciless toward those who dare to stay human.
Cinema Onstage – Literally
The most striking element is the cinematographic approach, not metaphorical but technical and concrete. Cameras weave between actors, and the DOP is part of the cast, operating live, visible, and essential.
We see:
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close-ups projected as if the stage were turning into Teorema’s emotional microscope, revealing every flicker of despair;
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overhead shots, a kind of divine drone vision, the indifferent gaze of a God who audits but does not intervene—Pasolini’s old biblical obsession, echoing The Gospel According to St. Matthew;
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lateral angles that function like a silent dialogue with conscience, with the character, and with us in the audience. Here, the spectator is not separate—we are the other half of the shot.
The staging feels like a film unfolding through human presence rather than editing.
Pasolini’s World Bleeds Through
Creuzevault doesn’t simply adapt the novel—he lets Pasolini’s entire cinematic universe seep visibly into the performance. Names of characters, references, and even titles of his films appear throughout the play, like ghosts resurfacing from the director’s filmography.
These resonances create a double experience:
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first, the story of Carlo Valletti,
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second, the feeling that all of Pasolini’s characters—from Mamma Roma to the youths of Accattone—are watching from the wings, nodding in exhausted recognition.
Pasolini’s Italy becomes today’s world without needing updating. The same wounds remain.
Carlo, Patron Martyr of the Modern Loser
Carlo Valletti—doubled into Carlo I and Carlo II—is not the traditional tragic hero.
He is something far more modern: a man drained of agency, endlessly processed by a world that no longer has room for individuals, only functions.
Carlo II throws himself into sensual pursuit, as Pasolini’s characters often did, but the body gives no answers—only further hunger.
Both men collapse beautifully.
Pasolini saw, with painful clarity, the coming era in which the human being would become consumable.
Creuzevault stages it without pity and without apology. Carlo is not just humiliated—he is processed, ingested by the machine of capitalism and loneliness. He could be working in 1970s Italy or 2025 Paris; the tragedy is the same.
And let us speak, with standing ovation and mild disbelief, about the cast—Sharif Andoura, Pauline Bélier, Gabriel Dahmani, Boutaïna El Fekkak, Pierre-Félix Gravière, Anne-Lise Heimburger, Arthur Igual, and Sébastien Lefebvre.
One has rarely seen performers so gloriously committed, so heroic in their surrender.
They do not simply act; they offer their bloodstream to the performance.
They endure the three-and-a-half-hour inferno with the bravery of warriors and the precision of surgeons, rushing through Pasolinian chaos with ferocity, tenderness, cracked humor, and that very specific look in the eyes of actors who have gone too far to turn back.
They die and resurrect on that stage more times per evening than most characters in a Shakespeare season.
If Pétrole burns, it is because they keep throwing themselves into the fire—consumed, incandescent, and unforgettable.
A Narrative in Fragments, Like Life
The show lasts 3h30 but moves with the logic of a dream or an internal monologue on the brink of collapse.
Pasolini’s “discontinuity of forms” becomes theatrical language:
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political investigation,
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esoteric visions,
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documentary staging,
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philosophical digression,
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and sudden, painful humor that arrives like a punchline delivered after the joke is over.
In another production, this might feel arbitrary. But here, the live cinematography gives it shape. The camera holds the narrative together like nervous tissue.
For Spectators Who Can Face the Truth
This is not friendly theater.
It is theater that reaches out, grips the audience by the collar, and whispers:
“Look. This is us.
This is where society has brought us.
We are all Carlo now.”
And yet, despite—or because of—this cruelty, Pétrole is exhilarating.
It is a tragedy that doesn’t need catharsis to matter.
It is painful, but it is pain with precision. A requiem not only for a character, but for a civilization that confuses human beings with inventory.
Verdict
Creuzevault’s Pétrole is theatrical cinema in the purest sense: not imitation, but incarnation. A stage production that understands Pasolini deeply enough to continue his filmography by other means. The presence of the DOP onstage is not a gimmick—it is the manifesto:
we are all being filmed,
we are all accountable,
we are all visible,
and none of us are spared.
A magnificent, overwhelming, and necessary work.
Pasolini would recognize it instantly—
not as homage, but as continuation.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris
November 24th2025.
#theatredelodeon
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