Fritz thinks he is unloved by his mother, so he fakes a drowning to test her love for him. Gisèle Vienne directs this text by Robert Walser with Adèle Haenel and Ruth Vega Fernandez. They reveal the contradictory emotions of the characters, through words, bodies and even silences.

L'Étang is a short early text, addressed by the writer from Bienne to his own sister, and is the only text written by the author in the Bernese dialect. It tells the story of a teenage boy who seeks proof of his mother's love, to the point of staging his suicide.

Gisèle Vienne, a choreographer and puppeteer by training, is one of those artists who pay attention to turmoil, unspoken fantasies, unconscious or reproduced brutality: to that dark territory of existence where the most sensual and engaging aspects of life rub shoulders with violence. The stage of her theatre exposes what the regulations of social life try to control, bury or silence – but which is all the more intemperate in its expression.

In L'Étang, as close as possible to Walser and her performers, Gisèle Vienne details Fritz's game, caught between illusions and reality, fantasy and violence. Without looking for what might explain a mother's uneasy love or the teenager's theatrical and funereal gesture, she patiently unfolds the situations and emotions of the characters. Dissociating voice and text, body, face and music, she thus exposes the ingredients of young Fritz's contradictory passions. Like Walser, she appeals to a sensitive and embodied intelligence that is attracted to nuance and paradox. A hallucinatory, sensual and disturbing theatrical phantasmagoria.