In Les Mouches, Jean-Paul Sartre stages a perceptive reading of Nietzsche’s thought, evading the traps of a theater of ideas in favor of a theater of the body: the city of Argos suffers from the symptoms of the morbid values and the putrescent idols that Orestes destroys as an experiment in self-surpassing and self-creation. Les Mouches follows the path of a theater of plague and cruelty which recalls Artaud’s conceptions as well as those of Camus and Barrault in L’État de siège.
