One of the few great directors of his generation, Kheireddine Lardjam has come a very long way and made an improbable journey, successfully anchoring his work on both sides of the Mediterranean. Born in 1976 in Oran, he was little more than a child at the start of the ‘black decade’ of the 1990s which killed tens of thousands of people, and only just eighteen when in 1994 Abdelkader Alloula, a true icon of Algerian theatre, was assassinated. The trauma put the town and the country in a state of shock. For Kheireddine, Alloula was a role-model, a charismatic figure. An actor, director and writer, he wrote for the Algerian people in their dialect and in such a way that the story, told through the figure of the goual (the story-teller) and the theatrical device of the khalka (the circle), was at the heart of the drama. Battling against the political and social situation in his country, he took his fight everywhere: municipal theatres, village halls, public squares, Moorish baths, cafés, backs of shops, cellars... Kheireddine Lardjam took up where he left off, not copying but reinventing this theatre of stating and playing, in which the text has the power...