Bovary

2021 | Assistant director

Theatre - Text

Emma Bovary marries her doctor, and with him her highest romantic expectations. But soon her boring everyday life starts to feel as oppressive as her corsets. She searches for more, for attention and for lovers, for new impulses to fill the crushing emptiness of her existence. 

Play the piano, be perfect, sois belle et tais-toi, be as society expects you to be, give your life but suppress any life you have left inside you. Emma suffers under the yoke of the outside world, but she keeps fighting for her ultimate desire … the desire to be whole. 

French author Gustave Flaubert threw a veritable bomb onto the world literature scene with his Madame Bovary. The story, of an adulterous doctor’s wife who takes her own life, was considered so shocking in 1856 that it was seen as an attack on French society and even led to a court case. Emma Bovary sent shock waves through France and the world. 

Flaubert’s book heralds the invention of the modern novel. He wanted to write a book about ‘nothing’ but it became a book about ‘everything’ – a book about the insatiable desire to be loved, about patriarchy, about (impossible) love, adultery, life and death.