Ils nous ont oubliés

Theatre: Ils nous ont oubliés

Thu 05., Fri 06. & Sat 07.06., 19h, Halle E, Wiener Festwochen 2025

Artist Talk: Fri 06.06., following the performance

Séverine Chavrier's adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Lime Works" is a musical poem about the collapse of a marriage and one man's paranoia in the spirit of Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick.

The lime works are a house: as white as a sterile chamber and as black as the forest around it. A couple have locked themselves up in there and made it their home. Mr. Konrad has a dream of writing a major essay about the sense of hearing, but is failing. He can no longer stand his wife, who is frail. He is incessantly busy organising the daily life, the outside world appears to be in league against him. Thomas Bernhard's novel was published in 1970 and is a venomous depiction of the collapse of a marriage, and at the same time the story of one man's paranoia. French star director Séverine Chavrier, whose work has never before been shown in Austria, stages it as a musical poem in the spirit of films such as Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining". Music is everywhere in Chavrier's theatrical total work of art, from the voices that rise out of the cellar to the plasterboard panels that are being played like percussion instruments on stage.

French with German and English surtitles.