There is a particular quality to the light in Menton at dusk in early September — warm, unhurried, the sea still holding the heat of summer while the hills above the old town begin to cool. It is the kind of evening that makes outdoor theatre feel less like a cultural event and more like a natural extension of the place itself.
On the evening of Saturday 12 September 2026, a host named Sophie opens the gates of her home — a one-hectare terraced agricultural holding on the slopes above Menton, planted with fruit trees and shaped, according to the event's organisers, with an artist's sensibility — to a small audience gathered for a production of Sappho de Mytilène. The performance begins at 19:30. Tickets start from 15 €, and the number of places is strictly limited. The precise address is communicated only upon booking, through the official ticketing platform Hormur.
The Play and the Company
The production is the work of cie trivii, a performance company, and is directed by Margherita Marincola. On stage are two performers: Laure Sauret and Rolly Godjo. The subject is Sappho of Lesbos — the lyric poet from the island of Mytilène who lived around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE and whose fragments, even now, carry an extraordinary charge. She wrote about desire, longing, beauty, and the particular ache of watching someone you love turn their attention elsewhere. Almost all of her work survives in pieces — lines rescued from quotation, strips of papyrus recovered from Egyptian sands — which gives the existing fragments a quality of incompleteness that, paradoxically, makes them feel more alive. To perform her story in a garden, under trees, in the open air of the Mediterranean, is a choice that needs no further justification.
The hosting model here is worth understanding. This is not a municipal theatre or a festival stage. Sophie is a private individual who has made her land available as a venue. The event is what the French cultural scene has come to call a rencontre à taille humaine — a meeting at human scale, between artist, host, and audience. The company trivii, the director, the performers, and the audience are all brought into proximity in a way that a conventional theatre building would make impossible. The orchard terrace is the set; the evening light is the lighting design.
Menton and the Long Habit of Gardens
Menton occupies the far eastern end of the French Riviera, pressed against the Italian border and sheltered by the Alps behind it. Its microclimate — arguably the warmest and most sheltered on the entire Côte d'Azur — has made it a place where things grow that struggle elsewhere: lemons, above all, which the town has celebrated annually for decades, but also citrus of every variety, exotic fruit trees, and gardens of unusual ambition. The writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who decorated the town's civil registry hall and established a museum here, understood Menton's particular character: its intimacy, its slightly separate quality from the grander resorts to the west.
A terraced mountain orchard, then, is not an arbitrary choice of venue. It is a setting with deep roots in the landscape and agricultural history of the region. The terraces — restanques in the local Ligurian-inflected tradition — were built by hand over generations to hold soil on steep hillsides and allow cultivation where none would otherwise be possible. To hold a theatrical performance in such a space is to place contemporary live art inside a landscape that has been shaped by human effort for centuries.
'Ce moment intime, niché au cœur d'un cadre arboricole pensé par des artistes' — the organisers describe the setting as an orchard conceived with an artist's eye, and the distinction matters.
For the audience, the experience will be shaped as much by the walk between trees and the smell of warm earth as by the words spoken on stage. Sappho herself wrote for performance — her poems were composed to be sung, often outdoors, often at gatherings where the boundary between participant and witness was not rigidly fixed. In that sense, this production is not merely inspired by its setting; it is, in some small way, returning the work to conditions not entirely unlike those for which it was made.
Reservations are accepted exclusively through Hormur (hormur.com), and the venue address is provided only after booking is confirmed. Given the limited capacity, early reservation is the practical course. For anyone spending the first weeks of September on the Riviera — when the summer crowds thin, the sea remains warm, and the light over the hills takes on that particular amber quality — an evening in a Menton orchard with Sappho seems, on reflection, exactly the right thing to do.