An interview with Caroline Guiela Nguyen
Image: Smith
An interview with…
Caroline Guiela Nguyen
Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Artistic Director of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg, has built a reputation for staging sweeping, intimate stories that cross borders and bring overlooked lives into focus. Her productions, presented at major festivals from Avignon to Vienna, often weave together documentary detail, poetic images, and a deep social awareness.
Her latest work, Lacrima, comes to the Barbican with a story that starts in the world of haute couture: the creation of a royal wedding dress. Yet the spotlight quickly shifts away from glamour to the people whose labor makes it possible — seamstresses in Paris, lace-makers in Alençon, embroiderers in Mumbai — each carrying the weight of this demanding commission.
With care and clarity, Lacrima exposes the hidden cost of beauty, asking us to see the lives and struggles of those so often left invisible. At a time when the exploitation of the most vulnerable feels increasingly undeniable, the show resonates as both a portrait of work and a mirror of the systems we live within.
Credit: Jean Louis Fernandez
LACRIMA follows the making of a wedding dress. Why a wedding dress?What makes it the right object for this story?
In all my shows, I use a choral narrative, where stories are told from multiple characters' points of view. That’s something very important to me and it’s the lifeblood of my writing. One of the questions I constantly ask myself is: what do we have in common? In my play SAIGON, for example, what they had in common was history and geography, it was that Vietnamese restaurant, the characters’ experience of exile. What there was in common in Kindheitsarchive (Childhood Archives in English), the show I created at the Schaubühne in Berlin? It was an international adoption office, it was a place.
And now, in LACRIMA, what binds everything together is a dress. Of course, it may seem old-fashioned, but if we look more closely, we realise that this dress concentrates within itself issues that are social, geographical, geopolitical and even historical. The embroiderers in India and the link between them and England are also tied to a colonial and post-colonial history.
So, I told myself, this dress which might seem superficial, actually embodies very powerful dramatic stakes. And then there’s something else, I wanted to say that this dress is almost like a tale. When the idea came to me, I imagined telling the story of LACRIMA through all the people who will touch this dress, and all the people who will somehow be cursed by it. That could be the starting point of a tale.
In the show, we see questions of gender, class, and inequality woven into the lives of the characters. How did those themes become part of the story you wanted to tell?
When I began writing LACRIMA, I sincerely thought the princess who commissions the wedding dress was not English but Swedish. The story was supposed to unfold between Stockholm, Paris (where the couture atelier was), and Alençon (where the lace comes from). It's when I came across a New York Times article that I discovered the existence of those Indian and Muslim embroiderers who contribute to the beauty of the world without anyone knowing. Until then, I thought LACRIMA would be a show that, for once, would remain inside France or Europe.
But see, my stories always lead me beyond borders. They push me to look at reality, which, as Patrick Boucheron says, is that we are facing a ‘world history of France’. And of course, this intersects with colonial history, which is something very personal to me as I am made from this history.
My mother was Vietnamese Indian and my father a Jewish pied-noir from Algeria. Even though I grew up in a very small French village, far from any sense of a global history, I see clearly that there is always an elsewhere, even right where you are.
The detail of the sewing workshop feels incredibly authentic. How important is realism in your theatre-making, and where do you allow yourself to step into something more poetic or imaginative?
That’s a very good question. For me, reality carries its own poetic charge.
When I discovered the story of Alençon lace - how lace-makers spent entire days in silence, how they sometimes developed heart conditions from holding their breath so as not to make a wrong movement - that was both deeply moving and, in a way, poetic. But I worry that using the term “poetic” softens the violence of it. But no, what matters to me is that their lives suddenly take on immense significance.
So, for me, there is no distinction between reality and poetry. However, there can be a distinction related to ‘when do I decide to step away from research to become an author?’. When to stop being an investigator?
When I was researching international adoption for Kindheitsarchive, I spent so much time in those adoption offices that I realised I could never leave this place and almost become an expert in the field myself. Why not do the job of those people in front of me?
At times, I could risk delaying the act of writing. But now, I write immediately, in parallel. I do it very early on. With my experience, I realised I don’t need to validate reality first then move to a fictional world. Reality and fiction nourish each other constantly.
Credit: Jean Louis Fernandez
At its heart, the piece shines a light on “invisible” workers. What do you hope audiences feel when they see the lives of these seamstresses and artisans on stage?
There’s a line in the play that I find very important: a daughter says to her father, who is an embroiderer: “Don’t forget, dad, that you contributed to the beauty of the world.”
That’s what I want the audience to take away - that when they see the dresses on red carpets in Cannes, when they see Lady Di’s dress or when they see dresses so visible and overexposed, they also see behind them the faces and the hands that have participated to creating that beauty.
How did you learn about these workers, and turn what you found into characters for the play?
I already knew something of haute couture - I’ve always been drawn to fashion. I also knew Alençon lace, because I loved it and I knew it moved me, but I didn’t know the real stories behind it. Discovering that touched me deeply. And as I mentioned, I discovered the embroiderers in Mumbai thanks to the New York Times article.
At first, something strange happened in the writing of LACRIMA as I intended it to be a play about women only. Actually, that was my initial project, I wanted to tell something about violence and secrecy. I had spent a lot of time working in women’s groups for survivors of domestic violence, and I thought my project would only talk about women, and then there was also fashion. I was also inspired by female textile artists like Rieko Koga or Mimosa Echard. So initially it was all about women and sewing.
But then, suddenly, this article about Indian embroiderers was like a turning point in my writing process because I discovered these men, hidden behind the sequins and thousands of thousands of beads. And it became obvious that their story also had to be told.
Credit: Jean Louis Fernandez
The story travels between Paris, Alençon, and Mumbai. What made you want to connect these different places on stage?
I like choral storytelling. Many of my works are spread across multiple places: SAIGON took place between Ho Chi Minh City and Paris; Kindheitsarchive also unfolded in different locations; VALENTINA, my most recent piece, takes places in Paris and starts in Romania.
At first, I thought this was just personal taste, maybe linked to my love for novels. But in truth, I think it’s linked to my own biography, and the reality of the world. I don’t believe you can tell any story today without it reaching elsewhere.
Even if it’s about a modest Vietnamese restaurant in Paris, once you unfold its story, it opens onto other places. Even if now, I had to study the chair I’m sitting on, I’m sure it would take me elsewhere, to another country. That’s globalisation, of course, so that’s not only poetic. And it is part of a capitalist system. That’s also what I’m describing in LACRIMA: capitalism, geopolitics, history, geography are all woven together.
What does the title LACRIMA mean to you?
For me, LACRIMA is part of a larger artistic project. I chose the title even before knowing it would talk about dresses, fashion, embroiderers, and domination. It’s part of an artistic vow I’ve made to myself: to tell a contemporary story of tears. Who cries today? Why? Not to make the audience weep, but to restore to tears their rightful place and meaning.
Image: Jean Louis Fernandez
If LACRIMA is a mirror of today, what kind of tomorrow would you want it to point us toward?
Right now, I find it difficult to imagine a brighter tomorrow. We are living in a very dark time historically, in France, in Europe, in the world.
The only thing I can say, and it connects to both my writing and my use of choral narratives, is that I keep asking myself: is the common still possible?
By placing people side by side, stories side by side, I try to ask this question. Is there still a common ground we can share?
At the moment, I don’t know what kind of tomorrow to hope for. But I do know that this is the essential question I’m asking myself now.
“Lacrima” is at Barbican Theatre 25 - 27 September.
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