Several intimate literary accounts of pain and suffering have been adapted for the theater recently — with varying success.PARIS — When Vanessa Springora’s memoir, “Consent,” was published in 2020, it was the start of an overdue reckoning with child sexual abuse in France. Now the book has made its way to the stage, in a Paris production by Sébastien Davis that captures its raw impact yet lacks, at times, the clarity of purpose that Springora found in her writing.It’s not for lack of star power. For this monologue, Davis has cast Ludivine Sagnier, a movie actress who is a household name in France. She has rarely appeared in theater productions: Her last stage role was a decade ago, in Christophe Honoré’s “Nouveau Roman.”On the smaller second stage of the Espace Cardin, Sagnier looks increasingly assured as “Consent” unfolds. The production tracks the book closely, with some cuts. Springora’s troubled family background sets the scene for her encounter, at 13, with Gabriel Matzneff, then a famous author in his 50s who advocated for pedophilia in broad daylight and wrote extensively about his sexual encounters with teens. For two years, in the mid-1980s, he trapped Springora in a controlling sexual relationship, to which plenty of adults — and even the French police — turned a blind eye.In recent years, trauma memoirs have increasingly found a home in French playhouses. The works of Édouard Louis, now fodder for a wide range of international productions, are a prime example; later this season, one of Annie Ernaux’s most recent autobiographical books, “A Girl’s Story,” about her traumatic first sexual experience, is due for an adaptation at the Comédie-Française.While not innately theatrical — first-person narratives lend themselves to monologues, but not much else — these personal accounts of abusive situations tap into the cultural mood and offer neat emotional arcs. A one-woman show like “Consent” is also relatively cheap to produce and tour, no small advantage in straitened times for the arts.The set of “Consent.”Christophe Raynaud de LageAnd “Consent” is a story worth telling onstage. A proportion of audience members at any given performance will have lived through the permissive years Springora revisits: In the wake of the student uprisings of May 1968, the mantra “It’s forbidden to forbid” was taken literally by many French intellectuals. Sexual relations between minors and adults shouldn’t be criminalized, thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argued. “Consent” is an indictment not just of Matzneff, but of the culture that allowed pedophiles to operate freely, and Sagnier is especially convincing when she brings it to life. With hints of dark humor, she mimics the men who surrounded the teenage Springora. There is her stepfather, who kisses her on the lips after announcing that he is separating from her mother, and the philosopher Emil Cioran, a friend of Matzneff’s, who explains to her just how “lucky” she is to be his child muse.Sagnier takes longer to settle into the role of Springora herself. Early on, when she talks about Springora’s absent father, her delivery falls somewhat flat, and isn’t helped by the heavy-handed live drums that are the musical accompaniment throughout. In a pink tank top and a white tracksuit, her hair in a ponytail, she looks like an overly gauche teenager. This staging choice starts to pay off when Springora and Matzneff meet, because it is so far removed from Matzneff’s idealization of Springora as a youthful “goddess.” As Sagnier lies on the shimmering black sheets of an onstage bed, the absurdity of their budding sexual relationship is clear.As Springora grows older, this traumatized child evidently remains within. The scene in which Sagnier wonders if she was “the accomplice of a pedophile,” because she outwardly “consented” to the relationship, is genuinely upsetting.Yet Davis intersperses “Consent” with fussy attempts at representing Springora’s fraying sense of self, as Matzneff creates a fictionalized version of her through his writing. A semi-opaque screen forms the backdrop of the production, and at several points, Sagnier is required to strip to her underwear and assume a puppetlike pose as she delivers lines in silhouette.The handful of scenes in which Sagnier acts out sex acts — opening and closing her legs suggestively, or thrusting while sitting on a chair — are equally odd when sexual exploitation is the driving theme. Davis’s heart is certainly in the right place, but avoiding any hint of sexualization would have been a cautious, sensitive choice, especially for a male director telling this story.Dominique Blanc in “Pain” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang.Simon GosselinThere are also more subtle adaptations of first-person trauma tales playing in Paris. At the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, the actress Dominique Blanc has revived “Pain,” a production created for her in 2008 by the towering French director Patrice Chéreau, who died nearly a decade ago.While productions regularly outlive their creators in opera or in dance, it happens much more rarely in contemporary theater, and “Pain” is a welcome opportunity for younger theatergoers to acquaint themselves with Chéreau’s dramatic work. The production was based on a 1985 book of the same name, in which the French author Marguerite Duras gives an unvarnished account of her long wait for her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp, at the end of World War II.Blanc, a highly regarded artist, took a short leave of absence from the Comédie-Française to recreate “Pain” with Chéreau’s former assistant, Thierry Thieû Niang, and the result hasn’t aged. A wooden table and a few chairs provide the setting. Blanc sits with her back to the audience at the start of the show, her shoulders sinking before a word is spoken, and recreates Duras’s anguished routine — and the agonizing weeks that her husband, the writer Robert Antelme, spent close to death after his return — so starkly, so plainly, that not a single hand movement feels out of place.Yuming Hey, right, and Nicolas Martel in “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” directed by Catherine Marnas at the Théâtre 14.Pierre PlanchenaultWhile “Consent” and “Pain” draw on well-known literary works, “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” at the Théâtre 14, introduces a memoirist few in France know. Herculine Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin, was the first recognized intersex person in the country, after a 19th-century court decided in 1860 that they had been wrongly assigned a female identity at birth.The director Catherine Marnas relies on the account Barbin left of their life to recreate the events that led to their death by suicide, in 1969, in a funereal yet often compelling production. Marnas was especially inspired to cast Yuming Hey, a nonbinary actor, as the play’s central figure.Wrapped in white sheets that act variously as a shroud and period clothes, Hey cuts a quietly melancholy figure as Barbin, an outcast who struggled to leave being a woman behind in a society unequipped to understand that transition. Some accounts of trauma are probably best left to literature, but “Herculine Barbin” feels as if it earned its turn onstage.Le Consentement. Directed by Sébastien Davis. Théâtre de la Ville/Espace Cardin, on tour and at Théâtre de la Ville/Les Abbesses from Feb. 28 to March 1.La Douleur. Directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang. Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, through Dec. 11.Herculine Barbin: Archéologie d’une Révolution. Directed by Catherine Marnas. Théâtre 14, through Dec. 3. More
