Original French title: Le Maître et son île. Genre: Tragicomedy. Cast: 7 characters (4 M / 3 F). Estimated running time: 1 hr 30, no intermission. Set: One location only: the Master’s large office, in a colonial house. No major technical complexity.
The riddle of the hand that poisons
On a Caribbean island swept by hurricanes, the heir to a centuries-old family business, obsessed with profitability, must choose: save his plantation, or save the living. Caught between economic collapse and ecological disaster, he will choose... “sound management”. A tropical closed-room play in which laughter eventually catches in the throat.
As Hurricane Irene threatens to devastate the island, the Master, owner of the powerful SOTOPAF company, is backed into a corner. His banana trees are being devoured by gilded purple-cross caterpillars, an ultra-resistant pest: the family empire is tottering. His foreman offers him a radical solution: a clandestine stock of “blue powder”, a banned pesticide of fearsome efficiency.
Inside the closed room of his barricaded office, watched over by a costumed ancestor-mannequin and battered by the storm, the Master must decide. Facing him, his daughter Agathe, an agricultural engineer, tries to warn him about the poison’s irreversible effects, while his wife is more concerned about her dinner parties. Will the Master turn a deaf ear to these warnings? Will he lock himself into an absurd productivist logic, dragging his family and the entire island into a destructive spiral, convinced to the end that he is merely doing his duty?