ABSTRACT
Marguerite Duras wrote three works inspired by this sordid tale — a novel and two plays, featuring an altered version of the story, in which a couple murder a deaf-mute woman who is working for them as a domestic servant. In Duras's theatre, voice sometimes appears as metaphor — her texts for the stage often discuss the quality of someone's voice, speculate what that quality might suggest. Duras, in her later theatre, creates the conditions for an intensity of listening — positioning us as spectators, in fact, in a place that might be designated 'auditory space', where the conditions of the auditory prevail. Duras plays with the levels of the voices much as Beckett did in a play such as Comedie varying the levels of audibility to reflect the varying emotions of the voices, and in particular, their fear and desire.
