After Traviata / You deserve a better future, Benjamin Lazar returns to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord for a new creation on the borders of theater and music. It is inspired here by a Renaissance masterpiece, The Heptameron, left unfinished on its seventh day by Marguerite de Navarre, sister of François Premier and a great woman of letters.

Marguerite de Navarre was inspired by the Italian Jean Boccace and his Decameron to write her magnificent Heptameron. In this book that the death of its author in 1549 left unfinished, a group of men and women, confined by torrential rains, decide, to pass the time, to tell love stories as captivating as they are dramatic, and all real.

A masterpiece of 16th century literature, the Heptameron is also a formidable theatrical machine, where each story invites a new way of investing the stage and moving from narration to incarnation. These Récits de la chambre obscure combine the stories and style of Marguerite de Navarre with the languages ​​and personal stories told by the twelve actors and singers of the troupe.

The scene evokes the painter's dark room, that of imagination and memory. It is also an echo chamber: Italian madrigals by Monteverdi, Rossi and Gesualdo, among others, resonate there. These sung poems, at the beginning of the opera, respond to the stories and suddenly multiply the voices of the narrators in dreamlike sequences. Over the stories and music, the stage becomes a place of constant and unforeseen travel between eras, between speech and song, between the 16th and 21st centuries and between reality and imagination.