Interior

Interior (in French, Intérieur) is a play written in 1895 by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, composed in rhymed dialogue. It is one of the few works he conceived specifically for marionettes. It premiered at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris on 15 March 1895.

The action unfolds in two contrasting spaces. Outside the house, in the garden, an old man and a stranger watch the family through the windows and debate how to tell them of the death of one of the daughters. As a crowd approaches carrying the body, the old man enters the house and, seen from outside, is observed breaking the news to those who, until then, knew nothing of what had happened. The play never makes clear whether the death was a suicide: the stranger remarks that the young woman had been seen walking along the riverbank, and the old man recalls a smile of someone who prefers silence or fears not being understood.

Maeterlinck, an avid reader of Schopenhauer, believed that human beings were ultimately powerless before the forces of fate. He also held that actors, given the limits of their gestures and expressions, could not embody the symbolic figures of his plays, and so he turned to marionettes, whose visible strings give form to fate's control over people. The title also points to a movement: the action passes from the outside to the inside of the house and, on a deeper level, from the visible to the spiritual.

The play belongs to his small-scale theatre written for marionettes, alongside other brief pieces. Years later, three of these works inspired the opera Le Silence des ombres by Benjamin Attahir, premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels in September 2019.