The Paris Odéon is, like the Piccolo, a Teatro d’Europa. A twin organisation. This is due to a special charter that, in 1990, ratified the status, driven by the great man of European theatre who was the director at the time: Giorgio Strehler. Over the years, The Odéon has brought seven productions of the highest quality to the Piccolo: six hosted productions Jeux de femmes by Zanussi directed by Brockhaus (1990), Orlando by Virginia Woolf directed by Bob Wilson (1994), The Cherry Orchard directed by  Lev Dodin (1998), Oresteia by Aeschylus and directed by Georges Lavaudant (1999), Quartett by Heiner Müller, another masterpiece by Wilson (2006) and L’école des femmes by Molière directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent (2009). The seventh, a co-production with the Piccolo, was Pinter’s Le retour, directed by Luc Bondy (2012/12). Stéphane Braunschweig staged Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice in 1999 at the Piccolo.
It is no coincidence that the Odéon returns to the Piccolo in May 2017 for the anniversary of the foundation.

Suddenly last summer... what really happened ? This work by Tennessee Williams develops like an investigation, not a police investigation, but rather a human one, regarding the death of the poet Sébastien Venable. How can one decipher a tale that is like a terrible hallucination?
«This is my fisrt approach with Tennessee Williams for the first time – writes Stéphane Braunschweig –. After Chekhov, Pirandello and above all Ibsen, it was natural and, in a way, inevitable, to wish to explore the work of one of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century. Suddenly, last summer is a little-staged work in French theatres, known principally thanks to the film by Mankiewicz. What grips me in Suddenly, last summer, is the way in which reality is unveiled under the guise of the most terrifying of ghosts».

A show in French with surtitles in Italian