The performance addresses sexualized violence as well as eating disorders.

At the age of 17, the young Annie spends a summer working in a children’s holiday camp on the northern coast of France. Far from the provincial Catholic environs of her home village and her parents’ grocery shop, she hopes to fulfil her dreams of love. Her first sexual encounter with her supervisor H, who is five years older, is an unexpectedly violent one – yet Annie makes every conceivable effort to reframe this experience as a passionate love affair. She counters H’s overt disinterest in her with an ecstatic attempt to satisfy her lust for him in the bodies of others. Derision and humiliation by her peers and H himself ensue, but this does not deter her from focusing her entire existence on him. Even though the euphoric and partying Anne perceives the summer of 1958 as the time of her life, the abuses find an immediate physical expression: for years, she is plagued by menstrual disruption and eating dis- orders. It is only much later, by writing the „Story”, that Ernaux acknowledges these events as experiences of sexual and verbal violence.

"Veronica Bachfischer delivers an intense, vivid, at times even hysterical performance as anger spreads across the sparsely furnished studio stage in an overwhelming, yet comprehensible manner".
Eva Britsch, theatre:pur

"Veronica Bachfischer achieves something unique: she makes Ernaux's analytical and precise text shine. The viewer accompanies Anna played by Veronica to her first party, watches her fall in love, and experiences her intellectual awakening and thus her acting masterpiece. Sarah Kohm elegantly directs the production to make both Ernaux's adult voice and the longing for her younger version palpable".

Miriam Stein, Haper’s Bazaar

Language: German (Polish and English subtitles provided)

Cast

Trailer