Lacrima

by Caroline Guiela Nguyen

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre Sydney on 23 January 2026

The Théâtre national de Strasbourg on tour for the Sydney Festival presented Lacrima, written and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen. 

A wedding dress has been commissioned for a (fictional) English princess; an atelier in Paris is to design and make the dress while an antique veil is to be taken from the V&A and repaired by the lacemakers of Alençon (successors to its original makers), and the train is to be embroidered with thousands of pearls in Mumbai. The complexity of the commission and the high-handed demands of the royal household collide with intense personal problems in Paris and emerging health issues in Alençon and Mumbai. The whole situation is increasingly tense as deadlines approach and impossible decisions have to be made.

The play was brilliantly presented in a set designed by Alice Duchange which principally evoked the atelier in Paris, with subtle changes for the other locations and a clever use of cameras to focus on particular characters or represent others not physically present (the dress designer, for example, a man-child wrapped up in self-glorification at the expense of all around him). The gradual emergence of the dress, created from swathes of cloth mounted on a mannequin, was almost like an evolving character in itself, a silent witness to the dramas surrounding it.  

The play was performed almost entirely in French, with some Tamil and English; luckily subtitles were shown on the screen used for the camera projections and matched by surtitles above the stage. Despite the added levels of concentration needed to follow the English text the audience remained completely attentive to an evening of high drama, a probing insight into all sorts of exploitation in the global rag trade and the human cost involved in creating a fabulously extravagant article of clothing which would only be worn once.