(from the programme of the Bergenz Festspiele)

Life could be so easy: baking a cake, building a mechanical toy, getting yourself ready for a rendezvous. But we people are not simple creatures. Everyday activities like these often have completely different motivations – secret desires and urges. All this lies at the heart of Home Work, the latest piece of music theatre created by the French artist François Sarhan.

In Home Work, Sarhan invites spectators to a kind of emotional peep show which affords a glimpse of the private world of three characters. Each of them is in the process of doing some mundane activity when everything starts to go wrong. The characters' thoughts begin to wander, their ideas and desires get muddled. The members of the audience are able to wander, too, seeking out their own personal viewpoint from which to observe the goings on.

François Sarhan is one of a new breed of composers: an artist who doesn't just write the musical score but creates the whole work. He decides on the topic, writes the text, and also designs the visual side of the production. Sarhan's works of music theatre are unpolished and home-made, the performances relaxed and informal. All of which is wholly intentional, of course. The result is a humorous, zany, surreal world in which everything is possible.

This highly original form of music theatre has led to François Sarhan attracting more and more attention in recent years. His works are regularly staged at the Théâtre Bouffes du Nord in Paris. In addition, a number of works commissioned by festivals are in production, one of which will be performed in autumn at Donaueschingen.