Thérèse et Isabelle
Theatre
From 04 to 06 December 2025
The novel Thérèse et Isabelle, written by Violette Leduc in 1954 and published in a limited form in 1966 by Editions Gallimard, is above all the story of a first lesbian love.
Long censored, Marie Fortuit gives life and voice to this work by adapting it for the stage, for a journey to the heart of the refined and poetic language of this great 20th-century author. The overwhelming power of a desire, of a passionate love destined never to be lived.
Thérèse and Isabelle are two young women who discover love and carnal pleasure in a boarding school in northern France. For three nights, Thérèse and Isabelle learn about pleasure before being discovered and separated from her "friend" by the adults. Through her poetry, Violette Leduc shows how desire is born, how it flourishes, and, above all, how it can be prevented and censored. The wound of this first love will always be at the heart of her literature, which uncompromisingly examines the different states of the female condition: feminist struggles, abortion, homosexuality, psychological fragility, and the multiplicity of passions and desires. Thérèse and Isabelle would not be published in its entirety until 2000, 46 years later and 28 years after the novelist's death.
With Louise Chevillotte, Marine Helmlinger, Raphaëlle Rousseau, and Lucie Sansen