Requiem for L.

Theatre director Alain Platel, along with composer Fabrizio Cassol, created a reconstruction of Mozart’s Requiem, the aim being to stage death ‘as realistically as possible’. The project got under his skin and resulted in the most intense theatrical event of his career.

L. – woman, mother, girlfriend and rebel – is terminally ill and opts for euthanasia. She gives Platel permission to be present at her death and to film it. He intends to use the images in the performance.

Platel, with long experience of the theatre, now makes his literary debut with ‘Requiem for L.’ in book form. He looks back at the exhausting process of creating the piece and at the years in which death was all around him. He writes about his doubts, hesitations and reflections on the entire project, his conversations with the next of kin, who also needed to give their permission, the anxieties of the actors who put this intimate happening on stage, and finally the performance itself, which left a deep impression on its audiences.