L’Effondrement des glaciers

Summer 1980. Yann Lemée, 28, a philosophy student and homosexual, knocks on the door of his idol, Marguerite Duras. He will never leave her. Quickly, the writer attempts to shape the young man's life in her own image, even wanting to rename him Yann Andréa. Thus begins a dizzying relationship that intertwines truth and fiction, intensity and destruction, and which is still considered one of the great passions that marked the history of literature.

Through a fragmented narrative, composed of archival elements and re-imagined scenes, L’Effondrement des glaciers navigates through the story of Yann Lemée, to effect a reversal of perspective and attempt to give a voice back to the one who became a character in Duras's work.

The play strives to confront what is still idealised in the collective imagination and invites us to question our ambivalences, by repositioning this relationship on a human scale. Can love take root in one being's fascination with another?

Can violence be given a place in intimacy? Under what condition(s)? Where does love stop and abuse begin? And, in the background, what makes posterity decide to retain one version of history over another, and what does it choose to turn a blind eye to?