Off Avignon Festival 2025: “In the Ogre’s Garden,” a play with two faces

The play is cut in two, like her, Adèle, a bourgeois journalist "by nexus, like everyone else", "spoiled" wife of Richard, a surgeon at the Georges-Pompidou hospital. And "slut" who dreams of gang bangs, sucks strangers and meets guys on apps desperately looking to "be a doll in an ogre's garden". First the dazzling one-woman show of Adèle, platinum blonde, little black dress sexually open in the back which obviously slides over the shoulders; it is Anne-Elodie Sorlin, absolutely demented, whom we knew in a comic electric battery version in The Dogs of Navarre .
In less than three-quarters of an hour, she makes the whole text heard, adapted from Leïla Slimani's novel, her body always unbalanced on her heels, and this dizzying face which shows everything and its opposite at the same time. Or the story of a woman on the verge of "nausea" - the word comes up three times -, doubly locked in her sexual addictions and an unbearable family life between a son she loves but that is not enough, and a husband on whom one kindly turns one's back before wishing each other good night. But fucking is not enjoying; too many "mechanical" lovers - the word comes up twice -, who will not
Libération