Ils nous ont oubliés

**Séverine Chavrier** adapts for the stage Das Kalkwerk (1970), one of Austrian novelist and playwright **Thomas Bernhard**’s earliest novels. A couple isolates itself from the world and becomes lost in the glacial landscape of a lime works. He wants to write a book on hearing; she is totally dependent on him, due to her poor health. They live in a conjugal hell, ruled by emotional blackmail, an antechamber of death. By adding a character (a female nurse) that wasn’t in the novel, the French stage director intensifies this violent relationship. A farce with tinges of melancholy and despair, ** Ils nous ont oubliés ** interweaves scenography, video and treated sound to convey to us the short-circuited minds of the protagonists, where illness mirrors the ruin of an artistic ideal. Séverine Chavrier describes this production as a musical poem. All of Bernhard’s humour and pessimism reverberate throughout this ode to sterility.