At La Bâtie, Philippe Macasdar puts Geneva before the often-cruel judgment of writers

Geneva’s residents may chase comfort, fortune and respectable appearances, but after forty they supposedly shrivel inside. That deliberately cruel portrait opens Philippe Macasdar’s literary journey through the city, a performance that turns Geneva over to the judgment of its writers and visitors.

Macasdar, a Geneva playwright and the charismatic former director of the Théâtre Saint-Gervais, presents the solo work “Writing Geneva” at the La Bâtie Festival. The performance moves through a city told in a thousand letters, drawing on the words of figures who passed through it, from Stendhal and Romain Rolland to Mary Shelley and Jorge Luis Borges.

The idea is both literary and archaeological. Macasdar searches the city’s past for traces that might make its present more desirable. He brings this collection of textual postcards onto the bare stage in the garden of the Musée Ariana, a grand setting compared with a ballroom.

Dressed in a blue coat like a traveller of the night, preferably a clandestine one, he gives voice to a procession of shadows. The result is an enticing, cubist portrait of Geneva, though the performance is also described as uneven.