Les Exclus du Festin

Is poverty less painful in the sunshine, as

Charles Aznavour sang? This question haunts Claude Frisoni and Raymond Reuter's book, published by the Chamber of Employees: is poverty more bearable in a rich country? A rhetorical question, no doubt, but one to which the answer is not so obvious. Poverty in Luxembourg is a little-known phenomenon, hidden and often deliberately ignored. But the statistics are clear: poverty does exist in the Grand Duchy, and the rate of working poor is the highest in Europe. Furthermore, in Luxembourg, more than 30,000 children, or about one in four, are at risk of poverty.

Les Exclus du Festin is an attempt to use

the theater to portray the different forms of poverty, their differences, their cause-and-effect relationships, an attempt to give a voice to people affected by these different forms of precariousness. What, then, can theater at the frontier of reality achieve? What shifts do its metaphors and abstractions, its untimely fiction, bring about, if not to show on stage what we try to ignore in public?