La Guerre n'a pas un Visage de Femme

Directed by Julie Deliquet. A fascinating documentary theatre piece about war, from the perspective of the women who lived through it.

Director Julie Deliquet, whose ensemble theatre is now a benchmark, brings together ten actresses in an adaptation of the book by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievitch, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.

In the intimacy of a Soviet communal apartment, former combatants gather. In the spring of 1975, a young journalist has come to collect their testimonies.

We then enter an unknown world: from 1941, hundreds of thousands of young women enlisted to fight against the Hitlerian armies. As they tell their stories, history gradually “humanises”. They evoke not war, but their own youth.

War is not only made up of grand events; it is also made up of small details. The most comical stories emerge. They suddenly want to laugh as much as possible and sing too.

It is there, in the vivid restoration of the past, that original joy is hidden, and that the tragedy of life, its chaos and its absurdity, is laid bare. It is not only the abject that is revealed, because despite everything, humanity stands firm and resists.

It rises, denounces, and questions our duty to remember.