I entered the Théâtre de l’Odéon — Salle Berthier — with the naïveté of someone who believes they are going to see Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. A classic. An ancient tragedy.
In short, a civilized appointment with cultural heritage. I did not know that I had in fact bought a ticket for an ambush.
For behind the reassuring label of Sophocles was hidden Euhdipe Roi, a play lived and written by Eddy D’Aranjo. A theatrical identity swap that feels less like an artistic variation than a sleight of hand.
One may enjoy being surprised at the theatre; one enjoys rather less being misled about the nature of the shock that awaits.
Very quickly, I felt that unpleasant sensation of having been tricked — led under false pretenses to a frontal performance about real incest and intrafamilial sexual violence. A subject I would probably not have chosen to confront voluntarily, and certainly not within the institutional setting of the Odéon.
And yet the play offers no escape. Behind the founding myth of Western theatre, it presses on its blind spot: incest not as symbol, but as concrete, massive, contemporary reality.
What can art do in the face of incest? Here, it does not console or elevate: it exposes. It forces the spectator to confront a reality whose stench does not dissipate during the intermission.
And in return, incest inflicts a violent twist upon art: the image blurs, language fractures, the stage becomes a field of tension where extreme emotion borders on almost physical disgust.
In this carefully orchestrated chaos, two beacons prevent the performance from collapsing into pure manifesto.
Édith Biscaro delivers a performance of striking intensity. She crosses the stage like an open wound, with breathtaking precision.
Volodia Piotrovitch d’Orlik responds with acting of formidable accuracy, restrained yet explosive.
Together, they give flesh to what might otherwise have remained a purely conceptual device.
What remains is Eddy D’Aranjo’s signature — omnipresent, insistent.
Oedipus Rex bears the mark of an openly assumed, almost claimed narcissism.
The author-director seems to contemplate himself in the shattered mirror of his own myth, at the risk of turning the stage into an echo chamber for his personal démarche.
This posture undoubtedly contributes to the project’s radicalism, but it also heightens the discomfort: the spectator witnesses as much a shaped confession as a collective work.
The question that persists, more stubborn than the memory of the images, is one of loyalty.
Does theatre have the right to ambush its audience in order to confront it with the unbearable?
Must the encounter with such terrible territories be forced, at the risk of short-circuiting the spectator’s consent?
The aesthetic shock is undeniable. The political necessity of the subject is equally so.
But the honesty of the presentation leaves a shadow over the whole.
I left the Odéon in a paradoxical state: shaken by extreme emotion, invaded by a disgust directed neither at the actors nor their undeniable talent, but at the reality invoked — and irritated by the persistent feeling of having been drawn in under false colors.
Rarely has a performance given me the simultaneous impression of deeply admiring what I had just seen and contesting the way I had been led to it.
That may be, after all, the proof of its power: it leaves behind an irresolvable contradiction, like a splinter beneath the spectator’s skin.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris, February 8, 2026.
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