The Malady of Death (La Maladie de la Mort)

Playwright Alice Birch updates and inverts Marguerite Duras’s novella, turning the female protagonist into a sex worker and investigating the impact of pornography on the psyche. In a hotel room by the sea, a man waits. The woman comes at night, only ever at night, and is permitted neither to speak nor to resist. Anything he wants, she must do. The cost doesn’t matter. He wants to learn how to love, what it is to feel again.

Katie Mitchell, one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic theatre makers, presents her own uncompromising stage adaptation of the provocative novella by Marguerite Duras. This radical reworking reveals the inner landscapes of both characters in a live cinema and theatre experience. It combines a theatre production performed live, with a film generated and edited in real time, and projected on a large screen above the set. Suitable for adults only. Contains scenes of nudity, sexual and pornographic imagery. Performed in French with English supertitles.