On Saturday, 27 September, a group of SELCS students and staff travelled to the Barbican to watch LACRIMA, a play by the French playwright, Caroline Guiela Nguyen. The play tells the stories of the workers — couture dressmakers in Paris, lacemakers in Alençon, and embroiderers in Mumbai — creating a wedding dress for an English princess, and the forms of violence that tear their lives apart as they produce a work of art.
The following day, several students had the opportunity to take part in a masterclass on acting in French led by Dan Artus. Dan, who plays the husband of the couture house’s première d’atelier in LACRIMA, has been the director of the acting programme at the famous conservatoire of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg since Guiela Nguyen took over the reins of the theatre in 2023. Students got to practice the techniques of situation-based improvisation that are at the core of Guiela Nguyen’s collaborative approach to playwriting and that form a central component of the acting curriculum at the École.
The group who saw LACRIMA admired the precision of its staging and its complex use of onstage cameras to tie its three locations together. They also appreciated the multilingualism of its script, which includes French, English, Tamil, and French Sign Language. Those who participated in the workshop with Dan were amazed at how easy it was to produce compelling dramatic scenes in only a few hours, especially while improvising in their non-native language. As one of them said, “I had such an amazing time and it really pushed me with my French, too, which was far less challenging than I thought it would be. It was such a cool opportunity.”
These activities are the culmination of a year-long partnership between SELCS and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg made possible by a Global Engagement Fund grant. In November 2024, Dr Macs Smith hosted Caroline Guiela Nguyen for a screening of her play SAIGON and a lunchtime seminar about multilingual playwriting, and in March 2025 he travelled to Strasbourg to discuss future collaborations with the goal of bringing together students from the conservatoire and SELCS students around multilingualism in theatre.
