Theatre: Camille – National Treasure, Bread & Roses Theatre from January 10-12

In a new play, the story of the late French sculptress Camille Claudel comes to the stage to tell her own story from her own point of view.

Claudel was ignored when she was alive but in the play her spirit has been awakened by a recent influx of interest in her work – she even has her own museum.

Since the 1980s many books, films and shows have used Camille Claudel as their inspiration and now, she feels, is the time to tell her story.

The play intends to show Camille as a human being, someone with feelings, a woman and artist ahead of her time.

Writer, director and performer, Carole Bulewski, says she has always been inspired by Camille Claudel.

Claudel’s story is one of a woman attempting to make her mark in an art form – sculpture – dominated by men. Bread & Roses Theatre from January 10-12.

She was an artist who didn’t get the recognition she deserved in her lifetime and a woman who lived her passions to the fullest and was eventually destroyed by them.

Her family turned against her and locked her away in a mental asylum for the last 30 years of her life.

Claudel famously said: “What was the point of working so hard and of being talented, to be rewarded like this?”

She wrote to her younger brother, the poet and playwright Paul Claudel: “Never a penny, tormented all my life. It is horrible; no one can understand it.”

In the play Claudel tells all, including the truly awful – the last years of her life, spent in an asylum.

Camille – National Treasure, will be shown at the Bread & Roses Theatre from January 10-12.