Who Shall Speak My Thought?

Who Shall Speak My Thought? is a haunting theatre text written by Jan Fabre in 1980. Performed by the Spanish actress Ivette Codina, this hypnotic solo plunges into the mind of a hypersensitive individual driven to the edge by the sounds, images, and sensations of the world around them.

Part confession, part fever dream, the performance unfolds as a torrent of thoughts, memories, and perceptions. Every whisper becomes a disturbance, every detail an obsession. Listening and seeing become acts of survival. With its poetic language, rhythmic repetitions, and striking imagery, the text explores the fragile boundary between reality and illusion, authenticity and imitation. Vulnerability becomes strength. Sensitivity becomes resistance.

Throughout the performance, butter serves as a recurring motif. Rich, sensual, and perishable, it recalls a substance historically employed by alchemists and later embraced by the artist Joseph Beuys, for whom fat embodied transformation, energy, and survival. Once consumed in abundance before Lent, it evokes a world suspended between indulgence and renunciation, excess and disappearance. Here, butter becomes a fragile monument to all that inevitably melts away: pleasure, beauty, and the illusion of permanence.

Who Shall Speak My Thought? is an ode to those who feel too much, hear too much, see too much and who continue to search for beauty and meaning within the overwhelming chaos of existence.