The performance “the Ogres or the power makes happy and tireless” may start for an hour of action-stations between the stomach, the spirit and the body dancing around a central theme: one of six inhabitants in the world suffers from hunger. For Christiane Véricel wants the stage to tackle the question starting from a bustling imaginary that ends up overflowing with creativity prickling the tongue with a scathing satire. All the way through, the “line” won’t be crossed, resisting to this humanitarian big-bang.
Six children actors arrive on stage, walking over peanuts and producing cracking noises as if the ground were crazing over. Christiane Véricel uses this effect as a metaphor for a drought but also for an earthquake. As for her, using this white ground sprinkled with simple “fabaceae” is a way to recall Haïti. This idea won’t leave her mind as if the creative energy of these “ogres” was in empathy with this nation whose device is “united we stand, divided we fall”. With four adult actors, the whole company plays to survive in quest of the food, regenerating itself through a link with culture as it is never disconnected from intellectual food (knowledge, art and play). This choice is a pure delight because it permanently links up the biological body to the social body and the citizen to the artist. The peanut recalls the stone of little Tom Thumb. The tangerine: just a splash of paint spurting on the canvas or maybe the nose of the clown that one finally swallows? For is part, the biscuit becomes a contemporary work of art. And the chicken is the body of the dancer quartered by the movement. But make no mistake about it: art, like food, pushes the human being to use all the threads of power and manipulation learned very early, whereas adults, strong with their knowledge, carry on their “famous” insatiable childishness for “infamous” strategies reducing culture to entertainment.

Here we are at the heart of a complex work! These happy and cunning “ogres” are shifting frontiers and playing with the hierarchies (between those who have the knowledge but are hungry and those who have enough to eat but are ignorant). They design new territories where the search for food becomes a vital skill requiring new ways to talk to each other, to draw the outlines of a different education not only based on acquiring knowledge with stiff rules that paralyse creativity.
 
Our ten comedians are completely involved in the performance (with a special mention for the children, staggering like Luca d’Haussy) and carry out successfully the rather foolish challenge to play our human condition starting from a question which answers we all know too well: why are we so truly incompetent to resolve the problem of hunger in the world ? Christiane Véricel makes fun of our weaknesses and vanities, but at the same time she gives them a deep brotherly look, resulting in feeding us more than enough!
Still, we would have loved some intervals to digest (just a little bit more binding stuff and silent respirations!). But the need for urgency felt by the artist is not that of the citizen-spectator.
Instead of giving us her answers, she provokes a turmoil that turns us into starving, united and happy ogres. Theatre is constantly « giving us back human affection » (Louis Jouvet), exactly the one we need and are longing for.