Iphigénie à Splott - De Gary Owen - Le Radiant - Caluire

At Radiant-Bellevue: Welcoming Iphigénie à Splott

At Radiant-Bellevue in Caluire-et-Cuire, we are proud to host Iphigénie à Splott, the searing contemporary play by Gary Owen that has electrified audiences across Europe. This is a story that charges the stage with urgency and compassion, reframing classical myth for a modern cityscape and asking what sacrifice looks like today. Our theatre is designed for precisely this kind of encounter: intimate, concentrated, and immersive. With clear sightlines and finely tuned acoustics, Radiant-Bellevue supports the play’s raw immediacy—its breathless monologue, its surges of tenderness and fury, its sudden pockets of silence—so that every seat feels close to the beating heart of the performance. We present the work as part of a season that champions bold writing and fearless acting, and Iphigénie à Splott embodies that mission: a lean, propulsive piece of theatre that turns everyday survival into an epic and asks our community in the Lyon area to look at the city—and each other—anew.

Gary Owen’s contemporary pulse, on our stage this season

Gary Owen remains one of the most resonant voices in British playwriting, and his artistic momentum continues to drive conversations well beyond Cardiff. While Iphigénie à Splott has built its reputation through acclaimed translations and revivals, Owen’s recent work has sustained the same fierce clarity and compassion. Romeo and Julie reaffirmed his gift for recasting familiar narratives with working-class detail and emotional precision, while Killology showcased his appetite for ethical complexity, technology, and consequence. We value this artistic trajectory at Radiant-Bellevue: Owen writes with a poet’s ear and a reporter’s eye, weaving muscular language with blistering social insight. Bringing Iphigénie à Splott to Caluire-et-Cuire aligns with our curatorial approach—programming that is both accessible and uncompromising, rooted in the present yet alert to timeless mythic structures. By welcoming this play to our stage, we invite audiences to engage with a body of work that keeps expanding, touring, and provoking debate across stages large and small, in multiple languages and contexts.

Witnessing Iphigénie à Splott at Radiant-Bellevue is, above all, an experience of proximity: to a voice, to a body in space, to a community under pressure. The play’s urban pulse—its barbed humor, its flashes of joy, its reckoning with austerity—lands with particular clarity in our hall, where focused lighting and detailed sound design carve out a living, breathing world from minimal means. We program the piece for spectators who relish high-stakes storytelling and for those curious about how ancient narratives can be remapped onto a modern street corner. Theatre-lovers, literature students, and anyone who follows contemporary European stages will recognize in Gary Owen’s writing a humane ferocity that refuses easy answers. Here in Caluire-et-Cuire, just outside Lyon, our audience meets a character whose resilience is both ordinary and monumental. As we continue to shape a season that bridges classic forms and contemporary voices, Iphigénie à Splott stands as a vivid example of how one performer, one story, and one room can change the temperature of an evening—and perhaps the conversations that follow it in our foyers and on the way home.