STORY OF THE MOTHER - Épicentre Company, with André Le Hir - Based on Marie-Hélène Lafon (Les sources, Buchet Chastel editions, 2023) - Duration: 1 hour.
In a short, intensely intense story, Marie-Hélène Lafon recounts two ordinary days in the life of a thirty-year-old woman in rural France in the 1960s. On Saturday, she collects the laundry, irons, cleans, organizes the children's baths, and prepares their things in preparation for the Sunday visit to the grandparents. Her husband's nap gives her a meager respite. As soon as he wakes up, the anguish of insults and blows returns. Then comes Sunday, when the whole family, the wife, her husband, and their three children go down to visit their parents and in-laws... With hurried writing, each word weighed, in its place, without boldface, the novelist manages to suggest an atmosphere as tense as a bow by the husband's violence, which reigns in the house with a dull terror, in which the mother and three children measure their gestures, their breathing, so as not to trigger "the circus, the bullfight."
