The Hedgehog's Dilemma

We are at the end of the 30s. A small group of patients is trying as best they can to live together in a country house converted into a care facility. This place welcomes people who, like them, are suffering from a strange disease that has the reputation of turning people into hedgehogs. This disease is scary because it is the disease of the weird and the misfits, the disease of those who would like to touch and be touched, but whose skin stings. In this house that brings together a handful of patients whom nothing seemed destined to live together, they intend to build a place of utopia. Between moments of care, brass band workshops, and rifle shooting, life could almost be sweet for the residents of the strange little place, but that would be without counting the fact that the disease sometimes kills, that times are in winter, and that nothing is more fragile than a utopia. With this show, as with the previous ones, the Greta Koetz collective attempts to synthesize the rigorous writing of a narrative in the most classic sense of the term and the search for the most joyful and absolute freedom on stage. They seek to combine the beauty of form and the vitality of chaos. Found there, pell-mell, are messy improvisations, sharp dialogues worthy of a Jacques Prévert screenplay, moments of farce and tragedy, moments of music, and cheerful clamor. One-quarter historical, three-quarters absurd, the story woven by Greta Koetz questions their dismay regarding the era, celebrates their thirst for the common, and fights with a candor, sometimes caustic, sometimes full of sweetness, against the tenacious sensation of stagnation that sometimes gnaws at them.