Victor of de kinderen aan de macht

‘There are no children any more, children never existed.’

Roger Vitrac wrote Victor or the children take power in 1928 as a thinly veiled  frontal attack on middle-class family values.

Victor celebrates his ninth birthday and decides he no longer wants to be a model child. He makes up his mind to pull out the rug from under his mother and father and rip the sheets off their conjugal bed. Victor and his six-year-old girlfriend hilariously enact the adultery between his father and her mother. The adults stiffen in discomfort and shame. Manipulatively and provocatively, Victor unmasks the petty bourgeois instincts, deceit and hypocrisy of his elders. The façade crumbles and while the adults frantically try and reassemble the pieces, their lives disintegrate even more.
At the end of the play and Victor’s birthday, there are no illusions left, the parents’ infidelity is common knowledge, there is no way back, Victor’s six-year-old girlfriend has left home, her father has hung himself and Victor wants to die. The children flout convention, kicking their parents squarely in the balls!

The play begins like a vaudeville act, but soon the intrigues succeed each other so quickly that the wheels grind to a halt and the play changes into a tragedy. This tragedy in which the characters sink ever deeper into an emotional bog retains vaudevillian aspects till the very end. Eleven roles are played by six actors