Theatre-goers at Paris-Villette are invited into a condensed radio evening in Ce soir j’ai de la fièvre et toi tu meurs de froid, a play written and directed by Julien Lewkowicz. The piece reconstructs the last broadcast of the late‑1980s free radio show Lune de Fiel by using a simple dramaturgical engine: a character discovers an old tape recorder and, through its contents, relives one volatile night in September 1989. That unspooling of audio into live action provides both the spine of the narrative and a way to examine how a small media outlet became a communal lifeline.
This production is performed by a five‑member cast — Laure Blatter, Sarah Calcine, Valentin Clabault, Guillaume Costanza and Julien Lewkowicz — who alternate between on‑air hosts, off‑mic staff and callers. The staging places a radio studio center stage while other performers sit as if in the audience, picking up imagined phone lines. Through this interplay the show layers archival fragments and invented scenes to reconstruct the chaotic warmth of a free radio moment: messy, funny, often crude, and always politically charged.
From tape to stage: premise and structure
The play’s starting point is deliberately modest: a man unearths a dusty tape recorder and presses play. From that single action, archives — tapes, voices and background noise — cascade into live recreation. The script borrows recorded snippets from the original broadcasts and weaves them with fictionalised backstage conversations. This technique transforms ephemeral radio chatter into theatrical material while preserving the immediacy of callers, jingles and off‑hand quips. The result is a hybrid form that foregrounds sound as dramatic fabric and insists that memory itself is performative.
Staging choices and performance
Director Julien Lewkowicz embraces the physicality of radio: microphones, cables and a central console are scenic motifs that double as emotional markers. The cast often speaks into amplified mics, producing distortion and proximity that mimic late‑night FM intimacy. Musically, the production toggles between nostalgic songs — including references to artists like Dalida — and contemporary club beats, creating sonic collisions that mirror generational shifts in taste and context. Lighting and smoke underscore the smoky, cigarette‑fumed atmosphere associated with 1980s studios, reinforcing a sense of time without relying on literal reconstruction.
Sound, archive and technique
Sound is both material and character in this piece. Actors wear earpieces and react to slightly delayed archival audio, producing a mise‑en‑abyme where recorded voices answer live bodies. That choice foregrounds the temporal gap between past and present and allows the play to interrogate how memory distorts and sanctifies. The interplay of recorded and live sound also heightens moments when laughter gives way to silence, especially when the text addresses the encroaching reality of HIV/AIDS, which cut through the radio’s buoyant tone with an abrupt and tragic specificity.
Cast and roles
The five performers rotate between multiple functions: on‑air presenters, a studio technician who queues music and takes calls, and listeners who become part of the onstage world. This fluidity mirrors the collaborative, do‑it‑yourself ethos of the original Fréquence Gaie broadcasts. The piece does not attempt impersonation so much as a reverent reanimation: familiar vocal tics and archival rhythms reappear, but the emphasis is on collective memory rather than biographical accuracy. The effect is communal — actors sharing a patchwork of voices to rebuild a vanished social space.
Historical context and emotional stakes
Theatre here functions as both homage and historical brief: Fréquence Gaie, created in July 1981 and later known as Radio FG, was among the earliest continuous gay FM stations globally, and Lune de Fiel aired between 1986 and 1989. The program’s last broadcast in September 1989 is the show’s dramatic endpoint, a night that the play frames as at once celebratory and elegiac. In the years after, prominent voices associated with the show, such as David Girard and Zaza Diors, died of HIV/AIDS, giving the play a heavy historical weight that underlies its comic surface.
Reception, awards and touring
The production premiered at the Centquatre in December 2026 during the Impatience festival and received recognition from the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD). It opened at Paris-Villette from March 19, 2026 and is scheduled there until April 4, 2026, with a planned tour in 2026‑2027. Critics have highlighted the show’s ability to hold both levity and grief in tension: it celebrates the anarchic spirit of free radio while refusing to soften the trauma that followed the decade.
Ultimately, this is a piece about how communities create spaces to be seen and heard. By translating a late‑night radio event into a theatrical evening, the production asks what survives when a microphone falls silent: laughter, slang, political courage and, crucially, testimony. The play insists that memory is not inert; it is an active, loud frequency that can be tuned and retuned onstage, allowing new audiences to listen in and remember.