Radius Opera

The subconscious, through the medium of dreams, has the power to free us from custom and convention.

And there are no greater customs and conventions than in the high-brow world of the dedicated paniphile.

“Le vrai réalisme consiste à montrer les choses surprenantes que l’habitude cache sous une housse et nous empêche de voir.”
Jean Cocteau, Le Mystère Laïc (1928)

Le Gâteau d’Anniversaire, originally commissioned by CNIPAL, France, is a farcical one-act comedy, which combines the topics of serious bread-making and the French Revolution, and ultimately showing how the subconscious can solve problems that elude the waking mind.

Solving Problems With Dreams

The popular idea that dreams exist to solve problems has relatively little scientific support, despite famous anecdotes. However, such “problem solving” aspects to dreams reflect the Jungian archetype of the “shadow” and its creative and gift-giving aspects and are reflected in Le Gâteau d’Anniversaire.

The character of the baker Louis is consistent through his dreaming and waking self, but his dream-world is in shadow or inversion, and he is tormented to give up his singular passion and his beloved sisters become terrifying apparitions.

“I chose to present such deep subjects through a comedy or farce based on the famous words ‘let them eat cake’ apocryphally uttered by Marie Antoinette upon hearing that the public had no bread. In English, the distinction between “cake” and “bread” is clear, but in French there is a finer difference between “brioche” and “pain”. Nonetheless, after meeting several friends so obsessed with breadmaking that they gave names to their sourdough starters, I decided that this, together with the traditional figure of the comic baker, would provide a fun vehicle for a comedy and a narrative for the more serious material.”
Tim Benjamin, composer ofLe Gâteau

Along with several musical jokes and numerous French puns the text takes in the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen, and with the subsequent transformation of the apparitions Marie and Antoinette into Olympe de Gouges and Théroigne de Méricourt the satiricalDéclaration des droits de la femme, and its invocation: “Femme, réveille-toi!” is recalled.