What do we know about women’s experiences on the front lines? For her 1985 book “The Unwomanly Face of War,” the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich spent thousands of hours interviewing Soviet women who had fought in World War II, to shed light on their forgotten contribution.
Now, 40 years later, a theater adaptation in France brings their voices to the stage — and they continue to cut through as new.
“My stomach is in knots,” a man behind me said as we were walking out of the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, after a sustained standing ovation at the show’s end. “We know all of this without actually knowing it.”
“The Unwomanly Face of War” is a return to familiar form for its director, Julie Deliquet, who has been at the helm of the Théâtre Gérard Philipe since 2020. Her last production, an adaptation of the Frederick Wiseman documentary “Welfare,” had landed with a thud when it opened the 2023 Avignon Festival, her French cast never striking a believable tone in their portrayal of impoverished New Yorkers.
In turning to the work of Alexievich, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral chronicles of 20th-century history, Deliquet risked falling into the same trap. Like “Welfare,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” is a polyphonic work documenting real lives. Yet perhaps because the inspiration here is a book rather than a film of real people with their own mannerisms, Deliquet and her team look far less constrained by the source material.
The production weaves together the stories of nine women Alexievich spoke with, reimagined as a lengthy group interview. Blanche Ripoche plays Alexievich herself, armed with a notebook; the show opens with her addressing the audience as if we are part of the session. “We’re going to start,” she tells us from the front of the auditorium. “I’m writing a book about war, even though I’ve never liked war books.”
The rest of the actors, lined up behind on chairs, look somewhat like a nervous-looking focus group early on, yet their stories quickly become engrossing. Their characters debate among themselves, sometimes talking over one another or offering clashing perspectives on the same events.
All of them voluntarily signed up to fill critical front line roles, many while they were still in their teens — becoming snipers, pilots, stretcher bearers or doctors. Overall, about one million Soviet women fought in World War II. (There are nods, too, to the role that Belarusians and Ukrainians played in the Red Army, and it’s difficult not to think of the Ukrainian women now fighting Russia’s invasion of their country.) Yet, as each of them details, the hardships of war were compounded by misogyny, both during and after the war.
No uniform fit them, and periods were a source of dread, with no sanitary products of any kind. At night, when the fighting died down, some then had to swat away unwanted advances from their own comrades. Wartime sexual violence is chillingly explored in some later scenes, with one interviewee stating matter-of-factly: “Women are weapons of war.”
Along the way, the busy-looking set — designed to look like a cluttered apartment and composed entirely out of upcycled elements from other productions, according to the playbill — starts to feel alive. The women get up and drink some water, take cigarette breaks, even sing songs from their youth with the help of a piano.
Deliquet’s directing style can be over-energetic in delicate moments, but her cast does a superb job here of tapping into difficult emotions without going overboard. Évelyne Didi, as the oldest woman, acts as an anchor of sorts, tempering her character’s extreme statements — she loved killing fascists and won’t apologize for it — with a quirky, sometimes melancholy demeanor.
Ripoche, as Alexievich, is ultimately the weakest link. With the conversation flowing freely between the women, she disappears for long stretches, and seems mostly there to remind the audience of the book she is writing. When she does intervene, the tone can be awkward: After a woman harrowingly recounts how her own mother was sent forward in battle to test land mines, Ripoche just moves on to the next question, without transition.
Yet opposite her, the other women’s back and forth builds up into a stunning choral performance. The smell and feel of war are vividly expressed, as are the difficulties the women faced in returning to civilian life. “Men were the heroes,” one says plainly, while their own wartime experiences were seen as an anomaly and a source of shame — to the point that some refused to claim their veteran’s benefits.
Alexievich’s character describes her goal at one point as “writing a book that will cause profound nausea”: an “exploration of evil.” Yet what the real Alexievich did, and what the show reflects, is much more subtle. “The Unwomanly Face of War” restores women to their full, complex roles in Soviet history, and in times of war more largely — a record that still needs correcting.
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