A small group of mature women read the novel in a literary workshop The eventby the French writer Annie Ernaux (Lillebonne, 85 years old). They know the crudeness of a text which coldly narrates, without adjectives, the clandestine abortion of the author herself, Nobel Prize winner in 2022, when she was 23 years old. They worked on it. This doesn’t surprise them. However, when the rehearsal for the first theatrical adaptation of the book in Spain ends, they cannot contain their enthusiasm.
It was a very vivid, very intense, sometimes very physical experience, they say. Some admit to having unconsciously “closed their legs” in front of the raw first-person account of the ordeals and violence suffered by the student protagonist of the play, who is none other than Duchesne, Ernaux’s maiden name, who also goes on stage to tell her own story when abortion was illegal in France and to question the young woman she was.
It is the same character who reveals herself and acquires on stage the features of the actresses Cristina Correa, who plays the writer who returns to the end of the 90s, and Lía Herbor, the young literature professor in the making who in 1963 prepares her thesis which will allow her to move up in social class, to change her status, to enter another world, to be the first university student in the family. A child, the result of an unwanted pregnancy, could completely upend her life plans, quash her dreams and force her to conform to the role model of other women in her hometown. Both weigh with all their weight on an almost diaphanous scene, devoid of artifice, like the surgical style of Ernaux, in a work which will premiere on December 11 at the Espacio Inestable hall in Valencia.
“When reading the novel, I imagined him on stage,” explains Correa, who in addition to acting also directed and adapted the novel, alongside Xavier Puchades. He was immediately interested in the subject, but also in the reflection it provokes on “the writing of memory”, on his own past. “I think it is necessary to continue talking about this issue, even if abortion is legal in Spain, just like in France, where 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 refused in certain public hospitals for conscientious objection,” declares the actress and screenwriter.
She is the creator of the company La Perra Coja, which took on the challenge of staging the Nobel Prize winner’s text published in France in 1999 and translated in Spain in 2019. The novel has already had two theatrical versions in France which were well received. Just like the film adaptation of The event, directed by Audrey Diwan, who won the Venice Golden Lion in 2021.
Correa did not want to see the film so as not to be conditioned, while she insisted on adapting the text. He calls his friend Xavier Puchades, an experienced playwright and director, and they get to work. For this, they needed the express approval of the author. They turn to Gallimard editions and impatiently await the definitive answer. “She is very strict and they wanted to know everything, even the music of the play,” says the actress. Finally, the Nobel Prize granted them the rights for its adaptation in Spain, but not exclusively, as it usually does with its work, so as not to limit its distribution.
“I think that the tone of the novel, far from victimization and easy emotionalism, succeeds in showing what happens to a woman when she loses control of her life. and the freedom to own your body. Because the words of this novel are carnal expression of women’s bodies, not only of the 60s in France, but also of times past, of our present and, it seems, of our possible future,” says Correa, 47, nominated for two Max Awards as a best-selling author and actress in 2020 for Tribute to an unknown person.
Puchades nods and takes over. He was also interested from the beginning in the social component of the class struggle, so present in all of Ernaux’s literature. “The right to abortion also allows you to benefit from social assistance. Women with few resources have much more difficulty, 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 towards the private sector”, explains the 52-year-old playwright, winner of the LAM International Prize from the SGAE Foundation for Generosity (2024).
The actress and also author Lía Herbor, 24, highlights “a phrase in the work” that she likes to repeat: “In love and pleasure, I don’t feel that my body is different from that of a man. » However, the consequences of a pregnancy have nothing to do with the man and the woman, other aspects that Ernaux’s work describes with precision, he emphasizes. “I think it’s essential to talk about the issue because the right to abortion always seems to be in question and it’s one of those things that can easily be taken away. It’s a right that should not be taken for granted,” he adds.
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