Mickey et la fin du monde

Winning entry for the Artcena 2025 Creation Grant

Mickey and the End of the World, or How I Buried My Father  Hannah is at a standstill. She finds herself in a liminal space, between dream and reality, between past and present. Something within her resists, preventing her from moving on. One question constantly, obsessively, runs through her mind: who was her father?

Mickey and the End of the World, or How I Buried My Father follows Hannah’s inner journey as she grapples with a father figure who is both absent and overbearing. Her father, who came from Algeria, was a taciturn, sometimes violent man, whose language and history she knows nothing of. Few stories remain of him, but there are many silences. A paradoxical legacy, made up less of words than of traces.

The play explores visible and invisible legacies – those that are passed on despite the absence of any deliberate transmission. What circulates between the lines: the unspoken, the wounds, the gestures repeated without understanding their origin. Through Hannah, the play examines how exile and domestic violence become ingrained in bodies and memories, far beyond the events themselves.

At the heart of the text lies the question of ‘killing the father’ — not in the literal sense, but as a symbolic and necessary act. Burying the father to silence