Émilie Charriot directs the actress Valérie Dréville in this intense monologue.

This is a strange and uncategorisable text. It is written for the theatre, but it does not correspond to what we call a play. It resolutely eludes that definition. It has no character, no dialogue, no situation. This personal text is one of unprecedented freedom, written in the first person. For Galea seeks to express what lives and speaks deep inside, in an atypical yet theatrical form.

This dramaturgical monstrosity calls for a theatre of words. Words that refer first of all to Falk Richter – the enfant terrible of German theatre – a child entangled in a personal knot, involving mum and dad and the pains of history. Coming back to what is hidden, at the bottom of a garden, the garden of the self. My Secret Garden. And coming back. Coming back from it.

Galea merges her garden with Richter’s. A literary tussle. She speaks to him because she has come back from the brink, like him. Writers, in general, have come back from the brink. This remoteness of the secret garden is the inner world – the lived, buried, accumulated thicknesses and depths of time. In these layers are hidden sedimented experiences of the world, of the family, of society and of history. And in these experiences, there is sometimes chaos. So we come back from the brink.

She writes what we experience: emotional intensities, impulses, wounds, enigmas, catastrophes, sensations, traumas. She writes what moves, and the writing must in turn move. We are made of feelings. “No text without a feeling of life”, she rightly writes. This is what is at stake in literature and in the theatre.

What is at stake in the text is the father. Her father. The one she loved so much, and accompanied in death. A story of love and death. Grief. For the love of father and daughter is an absolute, indestructible singularity. A journey through the feeling of life.

The language is electric, intense, unbridled and fragmented; it does not tell a story, but expresses the affects of a personal and family history, entangled with the concepts of politics (communism, colonialism, nationalism, gender relations) and the traces of history (the Algerian war haunts her words).

It is a matter of language. Because what lives and speaks in the depths of the secret garden conceals an unpredictable and unique language that must be discovered. To write (about) the feeling of life is always to let oneself be carried away by the suffocations of its emergence. And the theatre must be able to welcome and reveal the brazen eruption of this language.

Presentation by Frédéric Vossier