La Douleur at National Arts Centre

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2. La Douleur

Duras lived through the war as a member of the Resistance; Marguerite as a woman deprived of a man. One day the writer rediscovers the diary in which she had recorded with lucidity, surprise and despair her quest to find her husband, imprisoned in a concentration camp. Reading page after page, she relives the anxiety of realizing upon his return that he is not the same, he has become strange and unfamiliar, and that her feelings for him have changed.

Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang have placed the electrifying Dominique Blanc onstage in this unsettling autobiographical tale. An ardent admirer of the works of Duras, Chéreau makes the simplicity and intensity of waiting as an act of resistance reverberate throughout, making sighs and silences resonate with force, for everything in history can occur once again.