Going Home

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On tour
Musical theatre

The story starts in Hamburg. In a park in the snow. A distraught black man stands with 5000 euro at his feet. The hold-up went wrong and the Police have come to arrest him. Everyone is looking at him. He does not seem to understand why he is standing there. In just a few words, the scene is set: the story of “Michalak, the Ethiopian” unravels before us.

The play is about a young man, adopted by an Austrian family, who embarks on a chaotic journey from Salzburg to Addis Ababa. He fled from a country he could not identify to and dreams of easy money, women and sun. And yet, he will be confronted with the ”System” : Administration, Police, Justice...

Going Home narrates the man’s solitary fight, his inner quest, his wrong-wayround- journey. This modest and humane play by Vincent Hennebicq combines speech with music; intimate words with metatheatre and broaches current issues (individual rights, equity in justice, exile, the west as an el dorado...)

Performed by Dorcy Rugamba, Michalak is neither a storyteller, nor a poet. He is true, direct, and does not use any embellishment. The plain, musical and genuine writing of this play reflects this too. We follow the character in the maze of his existence, with his hopes and fears, his humility and his wrath, his disappointments and dreams...

Accompanied by the live compositions of Vincent Cahay (piano and drums) and François Sauveur (violin and guitar), and illustrated by videos filmed in Ethiopia by Olivier Boonjing, Going Home immerses us, musically and visually, in Michalak’s battered existence… And yet, the play ends on this note of hope: “I AM HAPPY”, a sentence thrown at humankind as a cry from the heart of a man who “wants to fight fatality”. One man standing; A hard-hitting show.

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