Imperial Ball – Boléro by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet

Back from the ashes like a mischievous phoenix, this stage adaptation of Hergé’s timeless comic hurls Bianca Castafiore’s shrill “Heavens, my jewels!” onto the boards and detonates a riotous, closed-door whodunnit inside the tranquil walls of Moulinsart: red herrings fly, misunderstandings snowball and Tintin’s entire gallery of eccentrics careen through a dazzling, hyper-faithful recreation of the album, where actors vanish into near-unrecognisable guises and the set itself crackles with playful theatrical sleight-of-hand—proof that some productions really do possess a magic, living soul of their own.

In French.  Ages 7 and up.

Actor Samuel Labarthe turns Nicolas Bouvier’s fever-drenched memoir The Scorpion-Fish into a hypnotic, miniaturist tour de force: marooned in 1950s Ceylon after a headlong road trip from Geneva through the Balkans and Afghanistan, the once-ebullient traveller spirals into tropical delirium, trading human company for buzzing insects, mirage-bright visions and mordant humour that flits between the sublime and the grotesque. Under Catherine Schaub’s finely gauged direction, Labarthe channels both the lush lyricism and the slow-burn torment of this “motionless voyage,” distilling Bouvier’s languid prose into a tactile, rejuvenating elixir that lets the audience feel every bead of sweat, jolt of wonder and sting of isolation.

In French. Ages 12 and up.