A major figure on Geneva’s theatre scene, Philippe Macasdar is undoubtedly one of the finest guides to the city’s literary history. Beneath its apparent discretion, Geneva hides an extraordinary intellectual hotbed, lying at a European crossroads where exiles, writers, thinkers and artists from every horizon have converged: a place where Mary Shelley imagined Frankenstein, where Fyodor Dostoevsky stayed, where Jorge Luis Borges lost himself, where Albert Cohen wrote, and where Robert Musil observed the world. Through wars, revolutions and pacifist movements, Geneva has continually served as a refuge, a laboratory of ideas and a stage for unlikely encounters.

A deeply erudite director, insatiable reader and emblematic head of Théâtre Saint-Gervais for nearly twenty-five years, Philippe Macasdar presents at La Bâtie a creation nourished by a lifetime of curiosity and passion — passion for Geneva, for its intellectual memory, its paradoxes and its discreet yet immense influence. Through stories, archives, delightful digressions and vivid texts, he composes a living and deeply sensitive journey through the “city at the end of the lake”, guided by one of its most precious experts.