Eight women, Thomas
Teatrul Nottara, Bucharest, Romania
„Oh god... Marcel...
my poor Marcel...“
Eight women and a corpse: the members of a wealthy industrialist family and their employees meet for Christmas in their remote country house. But the holidays turn out everything else but joyful. Soon the family leader and the only man in the house is found dead in his bed with a knife in his back. The telephone cable has been cut, the car doesn't start, the gate to the outside world is locked and to make matters worse a terrible blizzard is raging outside. One of the ladies in the house must be the killer. None of them has an alibi, yet everyone has a motive and all of them have something to hide. In the course of action the eight women get more and more entangled in a network of lies and secrets, which they weave.
The thriller comedy Eight women by the French playwright and director Robert Thomas follows the classic 'whodunit' structure in the style of Agatha Christie or Edgar Wallace. Somebody dies unnatural death and the only way for the survivors to escape the similar fate is to investigate the crime and to figure out the murderer before he strikes again – since only one thing seems clear: the killer is one of us. Each of the women is a possible suspect, and yet the play is far more than a simple detective.
Robert Thomas' Eight women draws a sociogram of a bourgeois French family of the 1950s: only the hard working man alone is responsible for the material welfare of the family and its employees, while the women, trapped in their golden cage, have nothing else to do, but to permanently circle around one another in smaller or bigger conflicts. The murder only seems to accelerate the processes of this pattern: eight women, eight passions, eight times retained frustration, speculation, hurt and injury collide against each other.
In a unique way the author manages to unite both thriller and comedy, serious touching moments and farce. Eight Women allows the audience to take a close look at its characters and their hopes and dreams, to see its own longings reflected in them – and to laugh about them at the same time. Robert Thomas' eight women are parasites and blood suckers that can turn every man insane, but they are also the only spark of life in a world congealed by conventions and monotonous work. A masculine world, about which it is easy to complain, as long as you benefit of its comforts. Emancipation yes – but please not at the costs of my life-style.
starring: Victoria Cociaş, Cristina Stoica Ivanciuc, Ioana Calotă, Diana Roman, Laura Anghel, Raluca Juganaru, Anca Bejenaru, Marina Palii
stage and costume design: Alexandra Boerescu
music: Tibor Cari