A l'ombre

À l'ombre features three Bertolt Brecht collaborators: Marianne, hans and Walter, loosely based on some of the great playwright's fellow travelers (Ruth Berlau, Margarete Steffin, Hanns Eisler but also Walter Benjamin).
The play begins in the RoW in the 1970s, in the former writing workshop where someone (investigator, Stasi agent, academic, writer's double, public representative?) comes to question the three protagonists about an unsigned opera, The Shadow Opera.
They are then found in 1932 in the same workshop writing this text while Brecht is absent. A parody of the Brechtian form (notably L'Opéra de quat'sous), in which three characters - the flatterer, the lover and the observer - recount the complex relationship of admiration, passion, jealousy and alienation that unites them with the writer.
How can we talk about the special status of artistic collaborators in the shadow of a great man?
How to evoke this form of voluntary servitude in which one is both revealed and subjugated by a being?
Against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism, Pauline Sales's play questions these all-consuming relationships in beings swept up in the passion of the world and caught up in the urgency of the political struggle.