In the second half of the 19th century, a music-loving minister loses his wife as she gives birth to their daughter. He finds refuge in his grief and starts paying attention to the noises of the world, from bird songs to the sound of rain. He rejects his daughter Rosamund, whose resemblance to her mother he finds unbearable… Adapting Pascal Quignard’s novel, Dans ce jardin qu’on aimait (In this garden we loved), director and actress Marie Vialle leads us into a world of sound where loneliness becomes total attention to the world and the memory of a loved one the manifestation of an unexpected cruelty. Inspired by the life of the American composer Simon Pease Cheney, played by Yann Boudaud, this show unfolds in a pared-down space where bird songs awaken in us the awareness of an infinite world. For this fifth collaboration with Pascal Quignard, Marie Vialle unspools the thread of a moving story, where the beauty of literature can be heard through the portraits of solitary beings entirely devoted to creation.
The author of a protean body of work (essays, novels, short stories)—considered to be one of the most important in contemporary French literature and often revolving around loneliness and music—Pascal Quignard became a household name after the film adaptation of his novel Tous les matins du monde (Alain Corneau, 1991) and his Prix Goncourt win for Les Ombres errantes in 2002. Dans ce jardin qu’on aimait was published in 2017.