" Please... No revolver...". What if, at fifty, he could relive his life, the major events of his life, alter a gesture, a word, thwart its course, and above all, avoid an encounter—that with Antoinette, the miracle and nightmare of his existence? That's the rule of this game: rewrite his biography. Take it back and correct it, go back in time, suspend it, make different choices, take different paths. Playful dream or dark thriller, joyful machination, Biography: a game undermines the realm of possibilities and transforms life into an uncertain puzzle of choices, desires, impulses, or reasonable cowardice. Frédéric Bélier-Garcia makes his directorial debut with this fierce and funny game of chess. A resounding success. Today, he once again takes hold of the dizzying comedy, a labyrinth of mise en abyme, to breathe into it the sharp, bitter air of the present.

What if life were a grand game of chess? This is the question posed by this sumptuous tragicomedy, directed by Frédéric Bellier-Garcia, 20 years after his first adaptation of the famous book by Max Frisch.

When Bernard Kürmann meets Antoinette at 2 a.m., he falls in love with her. She is sitting on his sofa, a cigarette in her hand and sunglasses on, and he is already madly in love with her. Fascinated, troubled, disconcerted, he has found the woman of his life. Or so he thought.

Seven years later, he relives the scene. The scene of their first night together, the night everything changed. Yet, when the curtain rises, it is not him facing Antoinette, his future wife (Isabelle Carré), but a man dressed in black, his hair disheveled. “Why don’t you turn off the lights?”, she asks him softly, her face close to his. As a passionate embrace approaches, the one that will mark the beginning of the end, Kürmann (José Garcia) interrupts everything. Here is Bernard from the future, come to alter the scene of the past with the help of a conductor dressed in black (Jérôme Kircher), and his two assistants (Ana Blagojevic and Ferdinand Régent-Chappey), who will alternately play the characters in his life.

The evening continues, but as he fails to resist Antoinette, his actions remain the same, and she always finds herself in his bathroom when morning comes. So, this is a scheme that doesn't work. So we rewind, we go back a long way, to when he was 13. And then the years pass, each with its own event. Will Bernard change the fate of that unruly classmate whose eye he injured? Will he choose a different destination for his Erasmus exchange than Berkeley, California? Will he decide to marry Brigitte, whom he doesn't love and admits it, but decides to cherish nonetheless? And now that he has finally met Antoinette again, will he know how to let her go before they grow apart?

This whole little orchestration, a veritable game of chess in which Kürmann desperately tries to move the pieces, unfolds in minute detail, details that could ultimately prove decisive. Driven by a veritable game of "what if I had gone right instead of left," the play unfolds infinite possibilities, shifting and increasingly precise scenarios that shape an ever more unsettling countdown. Multiplying perspectives, protagonists, and game masters, Biography: A Game poses the question of the inevitable, of life slipping away, and of human powerlessness in the face of the years that define us. Can we truly escape our lives? This is the question posed by this theatrical masterpiece, in which José Garcia makes his stage debut. Beneath its guise of a detective novel searching for clues to reconstruct the story, the play distinguishes itself through its elegant, sophisticated, and moving script, in which the five actors shine with their talent and collective synergy. A subtle evolution, fluid staging, sumptuous sets that move in step with the story—everything is designed to create a powerful, claustrophobic atmosphere, in which only we remain… facing our choices.