Your last production but one, L'Odyssée, drew its inspiration - quite freely - from Homer's epic poem. How did you move from the wide open Mediterranean sea to the limited horizons of La Cuisine?
Mladen Materic: After all, what is more normal, after a long journey, than to love being at home, and why not in the kitchen! More seriously, my plays have always explored everyday preoccupations, these small things which seem like nothing at all but which are the basis of three quarters of human activity - after all, what is not everyday? I think that when we go into the deepest part of these things, by trying to feel them, to understand them better, we achieve the myth, we touch the archetypes, the models of the human situation. One of the ideas which led me to stage the Odyssée was to take the opposite direction: perhaps by starting from a myth and the archetypes it contains, we could try to bring it closer to our everyday life, to what forms the essential base of our contemporary history, that is to ourselves. It was about seeing what this story spoke to us about, this story that everyone knows, even those who have never heard of it. Coming back to La Cuisine, we aren't very far from these archetypes. Simply, instead of speaking of a journey out into the world, we speak of a place of exchanges with the world, a place just as particular perhaps, in what it has of the essential, as Ulysses' voyage.

What made you want to work around this place?
What is it that is so attractive about this place, what makes it the place where the family comes together, talks, discusses, where often the most decisive decisions are taken, where the most important accounts are dealt with, not only the household accounts, but those of life? It's the place of our daily encounter with everything, by that I mean everything which is necessary to us: here we find fire - or any other source of heat which has replaced it, - we find drinking water, food, the minerals we need, it's a truly vital place, in the strict sense of the word. We can do without reading, we can do without listening to music, but we cannot do without any of the things we do in a kitchen, they're like essential rites of passage. There you are, I think it's a place of passages, not only social or familial, even if we do meet up with family and friends there, but also of exchanges with the cosmos, in the sense where life and death follow and replace one other: killing animals and plants, for the sole purpose of maintaining our own life, is, ultimately, exchanging life for death, and the kitchen is the place of this exchange. For me, the kitchen is unique, it's all the more interesting to question it today since it's been getting smaller and smaller over the last few years, it's tending to disappear completely, and with it all these fundamental values.

How did you come to work with Peter Handke on this play?
We've known each other for a few years, and we had already mentioned the possibility of doing something together. I like Peter Handke very much, not only for his work. Of course, what interests me with Peter is this certain sensitivity for movement, the gesture, for space: his writing shows his very keen attention to things, people, behaviours. There is much beauty, simplicity, finesse and a great sensitivity to the everyday. But it was the possibility of exchanging ideas with him, of putting them to the test which appealed to me in this collaboration. For example, when we began to talk about a project together, I would have preferred to get away from these narrow, enclosed places, which were the settings of my previous plays - besides, I staged the Odyssée just after - but curiously, it was Peter who brought me back to my confined spaces, and in a way, it was he who came in "to the kitchen"!

Concretely, to what extent did the text written by Peter Handke - who is known for his taste for a somewhat off-beat dramaturgy - accompany your work on the stage?
Peter's texts are very fragmentary in form, so we had long discussions on how to assemble them, and their composition. But beyond these times, and well before the elaboration of this play, we spoke at great length, comparing our points of view and confronting our opinions. Even if it is perfectly clear that the writing of the text should be credited to Peter and the stage writing to me, I can see for example that the scenes currently in rehearsal were initiated as much by his texts as by our earlier conversations. In the final analysis, the play will owe much to this long preparation fuelled by exchanges. On the one hand, we have much common ground, we both have the same way of seeing things. But, it also seems interesting to me to make the most of our differences, to enrich the play with the advantage of having several approaches.

Silence, the absence of words forms the basis of most of your previous plays. With La Cuisine, the text will not only be given to be heard but also to be read, since a part of it will be projected on the stage. Why this reappearance of the word?
Because it's a good text! (laughs) All through my career, I've had to reply to the question, "Why aren't there any words in your plays?" Now, you're asking me to explain why there are some in La Cuisine! For a long time, I've explained that what seems to me to be the most important thing in life is played beyond words, or beneath them. Also, what interests me on the stage are the relationships between people, space, light, etc. As soon as the word is withdrawn, it's a little like when an actor acts with a mask: me, I place like a mask on the words, this prevents a reliance on the text, or on the voice, and forces acting with what's left, that is to say, the strictly theatrical elements. I've also noticed that the absence of words changes the audience's perception, allows people to be more receptive, more attentive to what is happening before their eyes. So why is there text in La Cuisine? When I'm preparing a play, it seems more interesting to me to try to use things that are new for me, elements which lead me to ask myself: what can I do with this? How can I use these? It's less comfortable, but more rewarding than working with what I already know. Working with text is obviously not totally new for me, since I already did this at the Conservatoire, for example. Except that this never appealed to me. On the other hand, the text that Peter proposes won me over because it is not dramatic in the usual sense, with lines and all that could be expected. Rather it's a free text, which can be integrated on the stage as a real stage element. The possibility of speaking and of projecting some parts of the text creates interesting exchanges between what is said and what is seen on the stage, and between what is said and what is projected, etc. So the text really becomes an additional piece of dramatic material, and not just a literary pretext. For me, these possibilities of confrontation and of juxtaposition are very valuable theatrical materials.

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