LACRIMA - Perth Festival

Reviewed by Kate O'Sullivan

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Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA is a large-scale, technically intricate and emotionally devastating work that treats ceremony as surface and labour as its deeper truth. Set within the world of haute couture, the production follows the making of a wedding dress for an unnamed British princess, revealing the invisible pressure, exhaustion and quiet harm beneath its beauty.

Alice Duchange’s fluid set and Jérémie Scheidler’s integrated video design move us seamlessly between French ateliers, Alençon lace-makers and embroidery workshops in Mumbai. Live camera feeds draw our focus to hands at work, making labour both intimate and inescapable. The result is sophisticated theatre that trusts its audience and rewards sustained attention.

Nguyen avoids simple moral binaries. The play maps how luxury in the global North is sustained by strain and risk in the global South, while allowing pride, ambition and devotion to coexist alongside exploitation. The system persists precisely because people care deeply about the work.

A domestic storyline within the French atelier mirrors these global pressures. Maud Le Grevellec brings formidable restraint to Marion, the head of the workroom, while Dan Artus charts a chilling turn as her husband Julien, exposing how control and violence echo the logic of silence and endurance.

Performed in French, English, Tamil and French Sign Language, LACRIMA places language and presence at the centre of its form. Communities rarely centred on major stages actively shape the world of the play, creating a dense but purposeful theatrical landscape. There are moments where the surtitles don't perfectly match what is being said (noticeable in the English-to-English surtitles, and some of the more colloquial French) but this is not so distracting as to take away from the overarching intention of the work.

While some passages verge on verbosity and a few subplots feel under-integrated, LACRIMA remains a formidable piece of festival theatre: intellectually rigorous, emotionally precise and uncompromising. It insists we look closely at what we celebrate...and who pays for the beauty we consume.

Reviewer Note: Tickets for this review were provided by Perth Festival.