Paris (France) (AFP) – For one, it was "dancing" with a new exploration, for the other, an "impossible dream" which gave her a lot of joy: the novelists Lola Lafon and Leïla Slimani tell AFP about writing their first plays, performed starting this fall.

Published on: 08/11/2026 - 12:18

Lola Lafon and “the impossibility of dialogue”

“I consider that writing means experimenting with all forms. For 4 to 5 years, I wanted to do it for the theater,” confides to AFP Lola Lafon, author of eight novels, including “The Little Communist Who Never Smiled” (Actes Sud, 2014) and a comic strip.

It was a meeting with the director Emmanuel Noblet, with whom she experienced a first performance on the stage (“A State of Our Lives”), which pushed her to get started. “When I realized what I was going to do, it happened pretty quickly,” she says.

The play she puts on paper, entitled "Thank you for your collaboration", for five actors, directed by the same director, is a co-production of two Parisian theaters, the Théâtre du Rond-Point (performances until November 14) and the Théâtre de l'Atelier (January 15-February 28), among others.

In the closed doors of an airport hall where no planes are taking off anymore due to bad weather, between benches and a cafeteria, four friends going on vacation quarrel after an incident: one of them insulted an airline employee about her suitcase.

One “word too many” which generates misunderstandings, political and moral questions. “I wanted this small company to tackle the questions that bother me,” says Lola Lafon, namely “the impossibility of dialoguing” and the impression “that we are confronting each other in monologues.”

In terms of form, she placed emphasis on the dialogues, which she wanted to be “very rhythmic”. On stage, the lines fly.

A former dancer and singer, the author describes a writing process that was "difficult, with anxiety when I couldn't do it and a lot of joy when I did", going back and forth and rereading with Emmanuel Noblet.

She participated in the casting of actors and attended all the rehearsals, in order to “be able to feed the performers about their character, when they had questions”.

Leïla Slimani and collective work

The author Leïla Slimani, winner of the 2016 Goncourt Prize ("A Sweet Song", Gallimard), says for her part that it took "the strength of conviction" of the director and director of the Lorient-CDN theater Simon Delétang, for her to take the plunge.

His play, "Resurrection - A Case of Conscience", a free adaptation of the eponymous novel by Leo Tolstoy, jointly commissioned by the Théâtre de Lorient and the Comédie-Française, is on tour this month and will be in Paris at the Vieux-Colombier from November 25.

“I had this somewhat distant dream of one day writing for the theater, but it seemed impossible to me,” she told AFP, long convinced that her romantic writing, “very intimate, with little dialogue,” “was not made for that.”

She, who did a baccalaureate option in theater, attended the Cours Florent at a young age and has always loved this living art, says she "groped a lot, failed, went around in circles", during the writing process, made up of successive versions seen by and with the director.

Tolstoy's little-known novel "stunned" her with its modernity and established itself.

Its adaptation tells the story of a famous writer who, in his youth, raped a woman. Later, he finds himself on trial, facing this woman who has become a prostitute, on trial for murder. He convinces himself to obtain her forgiveness by seeking to exonerate her, but she refuses.

“This text responds to all my obsessions”, relates Leïla Slimani: “the relationship between social classes, the mechanisms of domination, the relationships between men and women, incarceration”.

Having come to attend the first readings at the Comédie-Française in July with actors from the two institutions, she did not, however, participate in the rehearsals.

From this experience, she “took joy” and enjoyed having been able to “work, create, move forward” with a collective, which contrasts in particular with the “loneliness” of the novelist writer.

© 2026 AFP

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