Mémoire de fille ・ Comédie-Française

A fervent defender of women’s freedom, Annie Ernaux returns in "Mémoire de fille" to the summer of her eighteenth birthday, in search of “the girl of 1958” that she was at the time.

As a supervisor at a holiday centre, Annie Duchesne has her first disastrous sexual experience with the 22-year-old “boss” and, immediately abandoned by the fantasised lover and scorned by her friends, she throws herself into the arms of other boys. The desire for liberation went hand in hand with the ordeal of humiliation: periods of amenorrhoea and bulimia followed, but also the realisation, after reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, of her relationship with submission. “Having been given the keys to understanding shame does not give you the power to erase it”, notes the author, who took more than twenty years to write about what remained for her “an unspeakable void”. The director and performer Silvia Costa, a collaborator of Romeo Castellucci’s for fifteen years, was seen by audiences in France during the 2022-2023 season as an actress in Pascal Rambert’s 3 Annonciations at Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse. Here, she entrusts a trio of actresses with the universality of this intimate story, which she had already staged at the Residenztheater in Munich last season. Written partly in the third person, this is a biographical, psychological and social piece. The singular quality of Silvia Costa’s theatre is to deploy a visual language that remains as close as possible to the text, entirely dedicated here to the scalpel-like precision of Annie Ernaux’s writing, where it draws its strength. In this show, she imagines a set design that takes up the idea of a “red photographic room” dear to the author, and develops within the stage space a time of memory, open to the unknown of human impulses.

with the generous support of Aline Foriel-Destezet, great ambassador of artistic creation

NEW PRODUCTION

TICKETS GO ON SALE
23 JAN

Creative team

Adaptation, direction, scneography and light: Silvia Costa
Costumes: Rebekka Stange et Silvia Costa
Original music and artistic collaboration: Ayumi Paul
Scenography collaboration: Thomas Lauret
Direction assistant: Robin Ormond de l’académie de la Comédie-Française
Costumes assistant: Clément Desoutter de l’académie de la Comédie-Française
Light assistant: Nicolas Faucheux

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