"Homemade bizarre"

Éric Loret | Libération, 10.07.13

You bet strangeness has succedeed. (...) The result (of Aix Festival´s new commission) is a stream of unconscious anxiety, with its scent suddenly returning "to the surface", says Mendonça, "as a school of fish." With its tight and psychological structure, THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER is reminiscent of Schoenberg's Erwartung, and Poulenc and Cocteau´s La Voix Humaine - but with two heroes instead of one. Here everything is chamber-like: the orchestra (thirteen musicians), the story and the setting. Sam Holcroft´s libretto (in english) transposes a short story from Cortázar, "Casa Tomada", lasting an hour and divided into three episodes, each one shorter than the previous. (...) Holcroft (...) moves the cursor to neurosis by adding two elements (...): the Sister´s obsession with maternity (...) and a strange final scatological burst (...). Katie Mitchell plays (...) a space inhabited and uninhabited, leaving throughout the whole hour a part of the scene literally haunted by the void.

(...) Mendonça seems to have had at heart the materialization of his "school of fish" metaphor, playing all possible percussive colours, directly tapping not on the heroes' fears but on their doubts, their screen-memories, on the unformulated, on the swampy mind. The reduced ensemble (almost an instrument by part) serves a shimmering and tectonic fabric, each timbre, each colour being both a clutch and a point of the harmonic framework. (...)