Philippe Claudel’s best-selling short novel about the fragility and fortitude of human relationships is brought to the stage in a theatrical collaboration between Belgian director Guy Cassiers and Catalan actor Lluís Homar.

Senyor Linh is an elderly refugee who arrives on a ship from an unnamed country to settle in another: cold, grey and apparently indifferent. He is accompanied by his infant granddaughter, Sang Diu, and driven to survive to protect her. With no idea of the local language, he exists in a delicate bubble, looking out onto the contamination and chaos of a foreign metropolis. 

One day Linh is befriended by a local; a talkative chain-smoking widower called Monsieur Bark. They swap gifts: menthol cigarettes for Bark, and a pretty dress for Sang Diu. They begin to meet regularly, drinking together in a café and exchanging constant greetings: the few words that they are able to communicate to each other. Yet the compassion that grows between the men seems more threatened by any further verbal comprehension than strengthened by it. 

Based on a Belgian production, the Catalan adaptation of the play reflects in its own way the confusion of the many European identities, which fluctuate and intertwine as countries adapt to a constant flow of migration and movement. While Claudel’s is a sentimental story, a fable that speaks of the most benign of migrants, it is not without poetic power; approaching some of the continent’s tautest themes: nationality, language, and historic guilt, with a soft touch.