THEATRE | JUN 2022
Olympe is a twohander about words and war. About Olympe de Gouges, the extraordinary playwright who fought for women’s rights during the French Revolution, and was guillotined because of it.
After feeling deeply insulted by a sign in a bookstore, a young woman’s spiraling thoughts freeze her to the store’s threshold. Should she go back and confront gender stereotypes, or should she just accept it? Not again. Not today. And so, she summones the spirit of de Gouges to weigh revolution, revenge and cancel culture against patience and forgiveness. But balancing how to be a woman hasn’t become any easier in the three hundred years that passed since she wrote her last piece.
In creating Olympe I set out to examine the timelessness of misogyny as a result of the shape of our languages (Dutch and French in particular). And by inviting Olympe de Gouges back to the scaffold, it is a meeting of two playwrights, debating which stories to forget and which to keep on writing.
Performers Anneliese Billen en Nikki Deras
Composer, writer, director, producer Cecilia Thoden van Velzen
Dramaturgical support Casper Vanderputte
Based on the words of Olympe de Gouges