House of Memory. Eraritjaritjaka refers to an Australian Aboriginal phrase that means "driven by the desire for something that is lost". But just what is that lost thing, if not the faculty of memory? The renowned German composer and director Heiner Goebbels reminds us of the absolute necessity of memory. On a bare stage in front of the facade of a house that is soon transformed into a projection screen, a man (accompanied by the prestigious Mondriaan string quartet) echoes the thoughts of the Bulgarian-born British writer Elias Canetti. Enthralled, swept away and transported by the music of some of the greatest composers of the 20th century, his observations are in turn amusing, scathing, desperate and invigorating, an attempt to decode the secrets of our fractured reality. A powerful medium through whom flow words and music, the French actor André Wilms is the conveyor of the memory of a century, of its intellectual meanderings and its anxieties about the ephemeral nature of time, orchestrating the fragments of a history that has been plunged into mourning.

With this musical and all-encompassing form of theatre, which brilliantly combines writing, acting, video, music and inventive set design, the indefatigable trailblazer Heiner Goebbels (whose ear is constantly attuned to new trends and to hybrid languages) brings us into the realm of living memory to share the vibrant presence of a man who is occupied, in much the same way that a territory is occupied. He slips us into this "museum of phrases" located in a house that is both empty and overpopulated, a cranium inhabited by sorrows and mysteries, by ideas and ghosts, harmony and dissonance, by literary and musical works that clash and clamour, interpenetrating and mingling together in a continuous flux.