THE PIANO MAN

One summer evening in 2005, a young man is found wandering along a beach on Sheppey Island in England. He is soaked, dressed in a dark suit, and refuses to speak. With no name, no documents, and no past, he is taken to a nearby hospital, where he remains silent for months—communicating only through music, playing the piano for hours with haunting intensity.

The media names him The Piano Man. His image spreads worldwide, and speculation explodes: a missing musician, a refugee, a hoax, a broken lover. Strangers project their fantasies onto him, turning his silence into myth. But when he finally speaks, the story collapses—revealing something quieter, stranger, and deeply human.

The play takes this absence as its starting point. The Piano Man never appears on stage. Instead, four witnesses—a social worker, a psychologist, a hospital priest, and a documentary filmmaker—reconstruct the mystery through their memories and interpretations. As they search for who he was, they reveal something about themselves.
Blending documentary material with imagination, The Piano Man explores our need to impose meaning on silence, the myths we build around the unknowable, and the desire to disappear and start over. It asks whether forgetting can be a form of freedom—and whether some stories are more powerful when they remain unfinished.


The play will premiere at TNS –Théâtre National de Strasbourg in France as part of the festival Les Galas in March 2026.


INFO & CREDITS

LANGUAGE French
LENGTH 90 min
YEARS 2026–

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Marcus Lindeen
CONCEPT Marcus Lindeen, Marianne Ségol
DRAMATURGY AND TRANSLATION Marianne Ségol
MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN Hans Appelqvist
SCENOGRAPHY Hélène Jourdan
LIGHTS Diane Guérin
CASTING DIRECTOR Lola Diane
STAGE MANAGER David Marain 
SOUND TECHNICIAN Nicolas Brusq
PRODUCTION ADMINISTRATION
Emmanuelle Ossena, Charlotte Pesle Beal | EPOC productions 

CAST
Nans Laborde-Jourdàa, Niranjani Iyer,
Anthony Bambury and Bridget O’Loughlin

PRODUCTION
Compagnie Wild Minds

CO-PRODUCTION
TNS, Strasbourg
CDN d’Orléans
Les Célestins, Théâtre de Lyon
Festival d’Automne à Paris



PRODUCTION PRESENTATION

︎ Download production presentation (English)
︎ Download production presentation (French)