Through an intricate blend of performance and live cinema, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord's The Malady of Death explores intimacy, gender, emotional paralysis, and the male and female gaze.

Running from: Wed 03 - Sat 06 Oct.

Playwright Alice Birch updates and inverts Marguerite Duras’s novella, turning the female protagonist into a sex worker and investigating the impact of pornography on the psyche. In a hotel room by the sea, a man waits. The woman comes at night, only ever at night, and is permitted neither to speak nor to resist. Anything he wants, she must do. The cost doesn’t matter. He wants to learn how to love, what it is to feel again.

Risk-taking auteur Katie Mitchell considers the unique way in which men and women scrutinise each other – as well as the potential for abuse of women within patriarchal structures. Affecting images, sophisticated camera techniques and courageous acting by Laetitia Dosch and Nick Fletcher come together, with the intense action unfolding both onstage and on a large screen to the words of narrator Irène Jacob.