Two years after their staging of Lenz, Georg Büchner’s incandescent tale, director Eléonore Bonah and scenographer Maria Clara Castioni, artists in residence at Comédie de Genève, turn their attention to the fascinating and little-known body of work by Basel-born writer Adelheid Duvanel.

Hypersensitive characters, everyday gestures that might be considered both absurd and funny, inner worlds that resist reality… Duvanel’s work is composed of short, incisive texts and a poetic prose reminiscent of Kafka or Walser, rendering in fragments the lives of individuals unable to conform to social norms, confined to the margins, or trapped within narrow spaces. Quickly forgotten following the author’s suicide in 1996, Duvanel’s work is now being rediscovered, notably through its translation into French, revealing a major voice in twentieth-century Swiss and German-language literature.

Drawing from Adelheid Duvanel’s stories, the two artists create a multilingual performance, in French, German and Italian, immersing audiences in the writer’s sensibility, her humour teetering on the edge of despair, her singular use of language, and the joyful, stubborn resistance of those who inhabit the margins of the world.