A disaffected woman stands on the street. She claims to be a window cleaner, for the time being. And she begins to talk. She spills her guts, expressing her anger and her shortcomings. Pascal Rambert wrote this blistering text for the actress Lola Giouse, directed here by Denis Maillefer, in a new version in which the actress performs in the round.

Texte de présentation par Eric Vautrin

The woman in Perdre son sac is at odds with society, with family, with love and sex. But she cannot accept that not fitting into a majority model – be it woman, employee, daughter or lover – leads to being ostracised from society, family and relationships. She refuses to allow the exclusion of difference to become systematic. Her anger and her weakness, her violence and her tenderness inhabit what remains to her: her words, her speech, her body fighting against separation.

In 2015, Lola Giouse was performing in Lac, the graduation show of the students of La Manufacture, directed by Denis Maillefer. The latter had commissioned a text from Pascal Rambert, a French author who writes for his performers by turning the theatre into the place to express that which life compels to keep silent, that which haunts and that which stirs. Shortly afterwards, he sent the young actress a long monologue, written for her.

Denis Maillefer presents Lola Giouse, a few metres away from the spectators, like the passers-by in the street who walk past the character in the text: she is what we no longer look at. The actress, inhabited by the infinite nuances of the text, swings and rages against those who, like us, stand by and watch in silence. In a vigorous, alive and vital impulse, she seeks her words, her voice and her way, in a society that prefers to ignore pain.