With its volume, the original version of Vie et mort du général Pitbull was designed to be an autonomous play for reading, as well as adaptable material for performance. Therefore, strictly theatrical contingencies have meant that its transition to the stage required a permanent dialogue to develop between the writing and the directing. Begun in the initial stages of rehearsals with Romain Bonnin, this work of cutting and rewriting has continued throughout the creation process.

The script the actors used at the beginning of rehearsals was quickly found to be only an intermediate version. The inversion and the reduction of scenes, and the writing of new scenes were always considered in this dialogue as taking note of the rhythmic values of the performance.

The main question was without doubt the following: How to resolve, on stage, situations proposed by a text whose finality is that there is no solution?

In the beginning, Louis has been ditched by his wife, fired by his boss, ruined by his judge, and placed on anti-depressors by his doctor. From which follows that in1863, the confederate general Pitbull sets off into battle and bids moving farewells to his fiancée, while in the Balkans, the soldiers Tom and Bob begin to wonder where the front of western civilisation has gone. Furthermore, it is a President weakened by feasting who is being treated by a doctor and a nurse with a strange therapeutic determination, to the point that when they give up their place to the advisers from the permanent emergency committee, they can announce to the President their ignorance of the real state of the war and his imminent electoral defeat. During this time, Frankie, an ambitious young mafioso, delivers a violent homily at his father's funeral, before launching into a conversation with his brother, Louis, about the real poverty of the deceased. Touched by the state of destitution which has also overwhelmed his brother, Frankie offers him his wife, Marie, a behind-the-times singer. Still seeking a front that has mysteriously disappeared, Tom and Bob begin to be hungry. But at the same time, Marie (Louis' new wife), Louis (Frankie's brother) and Frankie himself retell their lives, before being interviewed by Monsieur Loyal. Alerted by a massacre in the provinces, where information of international importance has vanished into thin air, informed by his counsellors of the suicide of his favourite counsellor, and aware of the incompetence of those who remain, the President leaves things to his Interior Minister, who introduces Frankie, who has just enough time to confess that the affairs are linked and that he himself is the murderer of the counsellor who committed suicide, before the ghost of this counsellor, accompanied by the ghost of Louis, comes to drag the counsellors, the President and Frankie down into the abyss. In return for which, Tom and Bob, still lost, and probably suffering from hallucinations from not having eaten, dream of enemy civilians that they would shoot without risk before eating them, while the confederate generals Lee, Longstreet and Pitbull assembled near Gettysburg decide the famous battle plan which will bring about the defeat of the confederate South. Before the battle, the ghost of his mother visits the general Pitbull, who takes advantage of this trance to shoot one of his soldiers, thus recording against his own side the first death at Gettysburg. After which, it's for good, war, retold by itself.

Pascal Adam's play resolves nothing. The temporal gone, the narrative absent, meaning full of holes, the dramatic subject disintegrated, nothingness established as a principle of survival … so many elements for a definition of a theatre of the impossible, although it should not be understood as the impossibility of doing theatre. The play invites us to hear what is said and to see what is done. It shows, simply, by handing us a mirror. What we see there, is this selfsame that is different, this our-self shown, it is this monster within us, which is spoken.

Vie et mort du général Pitbull shows us the world and invites us to be reflected therein. What then allows itself to be seen, is what is shown to us: in the mirror of the world, the monster is shown. What shows itself, then monsters itself, turns us into monsters, differentiated and related. Pitbull invites the double monsteration of the world: Pitbull shows by monstering, then monsters by dismantling. It is this permanent dismantling which works the play.

The impermanence of identifiable structure relates back to the impossibility of an unequivocal reading of the world. The monstered world - monstrous - is polymorphous, and only allows itself to be watched surreptitiously. The simple action of looking at it transforms it. The monster belongs to the shapeless, it won't be mastered in any way. How, then, for the director to show what will not let itself be seen except in its formal impermanence? To think the continuum through discontinuous dialogue allows the junction between the informal and the formalised to be created. The principle of continuity is based on the willingness to remove the character from all psycho-sexual functions. For the characters in the play, there is a need to deal with them in the sense of their inability to sexualise themselves.

De-sexualising the characters comes down to raising them to a strictly figural rank. For the director, to figure is the liberty to re-configure, then de-figure the world. This principle of a figure, de-sexualised thus re-sexualised by this new device, allows the project of the monsteration of the world to be carried out without necessarily fixing the intention in a binary approach. The figural monsteration is proposed as the third term. Through it is organised and constructed this unusual theatre of the world offered to us by Pascal Adam.