This is what success looks like: The Franco-British playwright, director and producer Alexis Michalik has just celebrated his fortieth birthday.

His first play, "Le Porteur d'histoire", has been played more than three thousand times since 2011.

Edmond, Michalik's third and best-known drama, has attracted over a million theatergoers since 2016.

Together, the five texts written and directed by the darling of the gods, who is also in demand as a television and film actor, have won a dozen of the French "Molière" stage awards and attracted well over three million people to visit the theatre.

Each of the five plays is currently on a theater schedule in Michalik's native Paris, plus the French adaptation of Mel Brooks' musical The Producers.

Since December 2021, this has already attracted 200,000 theater fans and music lovers to the Théâtre de Paris.

What do the ingredients of these successes look like – and can a basic recipe be outlined?

The main feature of Michalik's theater is the narrative character.

The debut piece already shows its true colors in the title: "Le Porteur d'histoire".

And starts with an audience address that problematizes the double meaning of the word "history" - namely: narration and history: "We will tell you a story.

But before that, let's make a quick reflection on storytelling itself.

About the meaning we attach to a narrative.

And about the boundaries between truth and fiction.” Reflection on the meta-level soon gives way to an adventure story.

Michalik's three subsequent plays also begin with a preface addressed to the audience, which places the upcoming action in a historical context - or asks the direct question: "What is it for you: theater?" In short:

Love, Separation, Reconciliation

The plot of his five plays can each be summarized in one sentence.

"Le Porteur d'histoire" tells a treasure hunt across the millennia and continents.

"Le Cercle des illusionnistes" (2014) the handover of the baton between the theater magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and the silent film magician Georges Méliès.

"Edmond" (2016) the peripetia-rich genesis of "Cyrano de Bergerac", the most successful text of French theater.

“Intra muros” (2017) jumps from the nineteenth century, in which the first three dramas are wholly or partly set, to the present and deals with a theater workshop in prison.

"Une Histoire d'amour" (2020) finally follows the love, separation and reconciliation in the face of the death of two women over fifteen years,

What these short summaries don't give you an idea of ​​are the twists and turns that Michalik is constantly doing as a storyteller.

One of his guiding principles is to keep the viewer in the dark about how the plot is progressing.

This is rarely linear and predictable, rather it flies from epoch to epoch (in the first two pieces), from stumbling block to stumbling block (in "Edmond"), from revelation to revelation (in "Intra muros").

Only "Une Histoire d'amour" largely does without voltes, but comes up with a ghost figure and a half-open ending.

Basically, Michalik is characterized by a love of storytelling, as found in columnists and novelists of the nineteenth century, and a penchant for the picaresque and peripetious.