With Maria Republica, François Paris fulfills a quarter-century-old dream of writing an opera. It was in 1991, while still a student at the Paris Conservatory, that the composer met Augustin Gómez-Arcos and told him of his intention to write an opera based on his novel. The writer died in 1998, but thanks to the bold and ambitious artistic policy pursued by Jean-Paul Davois at the head of Angers Nantes Opéra, the project is now coming to fruition on stage at the Théâtre Graslin in Nantes.

In the trenches, soldiers are locked in endless fighting: they move some kilometres forward only to return back to their former position in a deadly cycle. Elsewhere, a woman returns to a house she has once known and finds it now poised at the edge of an abyss. Wanting to leave, she encounters inexplicable obstacles. Chaya Czernowin’s harrowingly sublime work Infinite Now interweaves two seemingly unconnected storylines - Luk Perceval’s play FRONT based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All quiet on the Western front and Can Xue’s novella Homecoming - that both speak to the human condition of entrapment and existential nakedness, and beyond that to a will to survive.