“I win my freedom by cutting back on my sleep” – Sylvia Plath at Théâtre National, 55 years after her death

“I win my freedom by cutting back on my sleep.”
This quotation of Sylvia Plath aptly summarizes the thoughts and the inner conflict of this American poet of the fifties and sixties. The icon of a poetic rather than a committed feminism, Sylvia Plath will struggle her whole life between her wish to fit into the American Dream (perfect spouse and mother) and her irrepressible need to write. A profound contradiction that led to her demise.

This complex life is recorded in a personal diary in which we discover her life as a young woman and her first suicide attempt at the age of twenty. From this diary she will create a novel, The Bell Jar, in 1963. Reality will quickly overtake fiction since, that same year Sylvia Plath will take her own life, as if the staging of her depression caused her to commit this ultimate act.

To reflect on this feminine voice which is often reminiscent of that of Virginia Woolf, Fabrice Murgia has conceived a pop opera for one female voice and fifteen women, with music by Belgian author/composer An Pierlé accompanied by her quartet. On stage, a film set reveals both a film shoot and the wings behind the scenes; a spectacle on the border of theatre and cinema.