Shameless and unpredictable, provocative and amoral, Zozo is a fragile and unstable woman with no fixed abode. She lives in trains and has a pathological obsession with maternal love that scarcely hides the hurt and frustration rooted early in her life. The play takes the form of a series of flashbacks in which the end leads back to the beginning, seen from a different angle. While at the outset, objectively speaking, we see a scene in which the heroine is shown in the act of sex, irrespective of whether it is forced or voluntary, at the end, the same act is seen from the woman's point of view, as a liberating death. We are left to count the stabs. In the eyes of a hostile, dull-witted society, Zozo is clearly out of her mind and a marginal figure, however, in reality, the decentralised position offers her the only possible human view of an insensitive, cruel world.

Zozo, the heroine of Compte à rebours, first came to life in other short works by the same author. The play followed, constructed around her strong, attractive character, almost as a call for the facts, or an explanation. It seems the author, having stumbled upon Zozo in all her unseemly colourfulness, has attempted to better understand her, to unmask the hidden face of provocation and make it more bearable. Zozo appears as a bewildered yet resourceful young woman, disconcerting and scandalous through her refusal to abide by rules and taboos. Compte à rebours was begun in Germany in 1999, during a stay at the Ruhr International Theatre Academy and finished the following year during a festival of new Romanian plays. The style is direct, fast-paced, unembellished, almost like a film cutting, with narrow spaces carved into the obscurity and crowding of a night train and a few lower middle-class interiors. Give such conditions, the humour is black and cutting, in more ways than one.