Double Nationalité (Dual Nationality), is the title of the novel written by Nina Yargekov, adapted for the stage by Joël Maillard. On stage, four actresses. They are all almost always on, playing the same character, who they are not actually really playing.

It’s an ensemble play with a plot happening inside the character’s brain. The character is Rkvaa, a young woman of dual nationality in an identity crisis of indeterminacy. She lives alone with her potted basil plant, a stuffed mole, and uninterrupted thoughts formally addressing her.

 A fluent translator-interpret, she sometimes works with the French police on drug or solicitation cases. Also, she is vegan, slightly alcoholic, socially awkward, and she sometimes thinks she is someone else, like a princess or Salman Rushdie’s daughter. Oh, and one more thing, she has total amnesia.

Note of intention

« In 2022, I created a performance inspired by stand-up, Résilience mon cul. At the end of it, I give a book to one audience member. … While playing at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2023, I wanted to give the same book each night, my favorite amongst my favorite books. Nina Yargekov’s Double nationalité. This book has stayed with me continuously for 9 years now. I fall for it every time I dive back into it. It happened that Nina Yargekov learnt via one of her friends that I was giving her book out. She reached out to thank me. I was very moved. We started corresponding and I dared to ask if, according to her, this novel could be made into a stage adaptation. She answered that she’d be delighted. The work then began. The stage adaptation is mine. After reading a version of the adaptation of the novel’s first part, the author gave me complete freedom for it, since I only aim to tell the main plot of her story.”

Joël Maillard

Biography

Nina Yargekov
Having failed to pursue a career as a spy — her original wish — Nina Yargekov became a novelist instead. Born in France in 1980 to Hungarian parents, she holds a PhD in legal sociology, teaches at university, and also works as a simultaneous French-Hungarian and Hungarian-French interpreter for the judicial administration. Her third novel, Double Nationalité (2016), was awarded the Prix de Flore. She loves lemon meringue pie, storage boxes, and above all the Civil Code, which is her favorite work of fiction.

Joël Maillard
Since 2012, Joël Maillard has been inviting artists who share a certain taste for playfulness to create performances with him.
The theatre he creates consists of fictions that are always linked, more or less directly, to the anxieties of the present time.
Almost all presented at Arsenic, his work unfolds primarily through spoken word. Sometimes, a formal constraint (creating a performance through oral writing, or writing a stand-up routine) has been the starting point of a piece.
With Double Nationalité, he is working for the first time from a text he did not write himself.