La Guerre n’est pas le Visage d’une Femme

On stage, women transformed by war!

The Belarusian Svetlana Alexievitch – 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature – collects testimonies of Soviet women fighters during the Second World War. Julie Deliquet, the new director of the Théâtre National de La Colline, makes their voices heard in a vibrant chorus that resonates with those of all women from all wars.

In the spring of 1975, in a Soviet communal apartment, a young journalist collected stories from women throughout the Soviet Union who, as teenagers, had taken up arms against Hitler’s army. These words of incredibly powerful women question the condition of those who, even today, decide to fight on the front line in armed conflicts. Julie Deliquet composes a theatre of listening where history moves from myth to intimacy through sometimes terrible, sometimes comical details. In this living memory emerges, beyond the tragic, an irreducible joy: that of standing up for freedom.