Plantation A…

In the 1950s French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet innovated a manner of storytelling focused purely on a drama’s inanimate aspects and on its incidental components. His stories spell out the habits and patterns of people: what they hold, where they sit and how they touch. Robbe-Grillet’s breakthrough novel, Jealousy (1957), repeatedly visits an assortment of compact scenes-each within the same day-and-a-half window-on adjacent plantations in an undisclosed location. From this place, whose surface we explore in aurally-discernible routes and patterns, comes a theatrical puzzle. The sum of these descriptions leads the story’s narrator, a man brought to a standstill by jealousy, to suspect an infidelity between his wife and their neighbour. What’s missing is the character whose very name contains an ellipse-three dots. We know her only as A…Based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1957 novel JealousyPart of Grimeborn Opera Festival 2024. Studio 1