Based on Annie Ernaux's Nobel Prize-winning work, this production traces a profound moment of rupture in the life of a young woman in 1960s France. Through precise language and unflinching testimony, the play excavates the experience of an illegal abortion in 1963 — examining not just the physical intervention, but the networks of silence, shame, and social control that surrounded women's bodies.

Ernaux's text moves between tenses and perspectives, searching across decades for authentic language to express what was suppressed, what was endured, and how memory itself becomes an act of reclamation. The performance is a conversation between the younger self who lived through that moment and the mature writer who discovered that language, once found, becomes transformative.

This is a work of historical reckoning and intimate witness. Running 80 minutes without intermission, it holds space for a story that was long forbidden, now necessary. Read more