Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s novel about clandestine abortion turns into a theater in Spain | Culture | EUROtoday

A small group of mature ladies is studying the novel in a literary workshop The occasionby the French author Annie Ernaux (Lillebonne, 85 years previous). They know the crudeness of a textual content that coldly narrates, with out adjectives, the clandestine abortion of the writer herself, Nobel Prize winner in 2022, when she was 23 years previous. They have labored on it. It does not take them abruptly. However, when the rehearsal for the primary theatrical adaptation of the guide in Spain ends, they can not include their pleasure.

It has been a really energetic expertise, very intense, at instances very bodily, they are saying. There are those that admit to having unconsciously “closed their legs” earlier than the uncooked first-person account of the hardships and violence suffered by the coed protagonist of the play, who’s none aside from Duchesne, Ernaux’s maiden identify, who additionally takes the stage to relate her personal story when abortion was unlawful in France and to query the younger girl she was.

It is similar character who unfolds and acquires on stage the traits of the actresses Cristina Correa, who performs the author who seems again on the finish of the nineties, and Lía Herbor, the younger literature professor within the making who prepares her thesis in 1963 that can allow her to rise in social class, change her standing, enter one other world, be the primary college scholar within the household. A toddler, the results of an undesirable being pregnant, might fully disrupt her life plans, cancel her desires and drive her to adapt to the sample of different ladies in her hometown. The two of them carry all the burden on an nearly diaphanous stage, stripped of artifice, similar to Ernaux’s surgical type, in a piece that can premiere on December 11 on the Espacio Inestable corridor in Valencia.

“As I read the novel, I was imagining it on stage,” explains Correa, who along with appearing has additionally directed and tailored the novel, together with Xavier Puchades. He was instantly within the matter, but additionally within the reflection it raises about “the writing of memory,” about one’s personal previous. “I think it is necessary to continue talking about this issue, even though abortion is legal in Spain, just like in France, where, by the way, it is also a constitutional right. Opinions are continually expressed about our bodies, many women are harassed at the doors of clinics and even abortion continues to be denied in some public hospitals due to conscientious objection,” says the actress and screenwriter.

She is the creator of the corporate La Perra Coja, which has taken on the problem of placing on stage the Nobel Prize textual content revealed in France in 1999 and translated in Spain in 2019. The novel has already had two theatrical variations in France which have been effectively acquired. As did the movie adaptation of The occasion, directed by Audrey Diwan, which received the Venice Golden Lion in 2021.

Correa didn’t need to see the movie in order to not be conditioned, when she insisted on adapting the textual content. He referred to as his buddy Xavier Puchades, a playwright and stage director with intensive expertise, and so they started working. For this they wanted the categorical approval of the writer. They turned to the Gallimard publishing home and anxiously awaited the ultimate response. “She is very strict and they wanted to know everything, even the music of the play,” says the actress. Finally, the Nobel Prize gave them the rights for its adaptation in Spain, however not completely, because it often does with its work, so as to not restrict its dissemination.

“I think that the tone of the novel, far from victimhood and easy emotionality, is a success in showing what happens to a woman when she loses control of her life. and the freedom to be the owner of her body. Because the words of this novel are carnal expression of women’s bodies, not only of the 60s in France, also of past times, of our present and, it seems, of our possible future,” says Correa, 47, nominated for two Max Awards as best-selling author and actress in 2020 for Tribute to an unknown.

Puchades nods and takes the baton. He was also interested from the beginning in the social component of class struggle, so present in all of Ernaux’s literature. “The right to abort also allows you to have a social lift. Women with few resources have it much more difficult even now that it is legal. If you have money, you may not even consider going to Social Security which, on the other hand, in the vast majority of autonomous regions directs you to the private one,” says the 52-year-old playwright, winner of the SGAE Foundation’s LAM International Award for The generosity (2024).

The actress and also author Lía Herbor, 24, points out “a phrase in the work” that she likes to repeat: “In love and pleasure I do not feel that my body is different from that of a man.” However, the results of a being pregnant don’t have anything to do with a person and a girl, different features that Ernaux’s work precisely describes, he factors out. “I feel it’s key to speak about the issue, as a result of the correct to abortion at all times appears to be in query and it’s a type of issues that may simply be taken away. It is a proper that shouldn’t be taken as a right,” he provides.