This year, Evenings on Campus is going one further with its drama projects. It is proposing an experimental theatre-piece which will be performed by University Theatre Studies students under the direction of Stefan Aquilina. It is a finely-crafted piece which will make reference to crucial aspects of the life of French maverick playwright, poet and painter, Antonin Artaud.

Artaud’s revolutionary ideas regarding the theatre, his obsessive need to transform it from a purely artistic experience to a visceral, real-life “cruel” experience, crystallise in this limpid-yet-dense performance which no person with a live interest in theatre should miss.

In accordance with his convictions, the work deliberately suppresses the use of dialogue and highlights types of languages other than verbal, in particular, the language of gesture and the language of objects. The actions are dryly cut, the flow is intentionally subverted.

It is a raw 60-minute piece set in an unconventional theatre-space. It focuses on social collision and the large measure of self-inflicted pain that the commitment to follow one’s passion to create, brings with it.

Antonin Artaud called himself “le Momo” which in his native Marseilles dialect means fool or village idiot, the person who stands out from the rest but equally the person foolish enough to pursue an impossible dream. Has the test of time proved him to be foolish? Artaud’s ideas have deeply influenced renowned playwrights such as Samuel Beckett while his views regarding personally-experienced madness and psychiatric hospitals have been endorsed and worked upon by writers such as Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing.

Le Momo will be performed at 8.30pm on the University campus on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets at Lm2 can be obtained at the door or from Agenda outlets. Evenings on Campus is organised by the Koperattiva Kulturali Universitarja in collaboration with the University of Malta and KSU with the support of KPMG, BOV, Air Malta and the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts.