Ils nous ont oubliés
Event
Séverine Chavrier adapts for the stage “Das Kalkwerk” (1970), one of Austrian writer and playwright Thomas Bernhard’s earliest novels. A couple isolates itself from the world and becomes lost in the glacial landscape of a lime mine: he wants to write a book on hearing; she is totally dependent on him, due to her poor health. They live in a conjugal hell, ruled by blackmail, an antechamber of death. By adding a character (a female nurse) that wasn’t in the novel, the French stage director intensifies this violent relationship. A farce tinged with melancholy and despair, “Ils nous ont oubliés” interweaves scenography, video and sound treatment to convey the mental short circuit of the protagonists, where illness mirrors the ruin of an artistic ideal. Séverine Chavrier describes this production as a musical poem. All of Bernhard’s humour and pessimism reverberate throughout this ode to sterility.
