Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The young, somewhat fanciful Emma Rouault marries the staid country doctor Charles Bovary in the hope of a quiet life. However, she soon feels suffocated by the oppressing confines of this marriage and life in the provinces. She escapes into the intoxicating imaginary world of literature. In her rigorous pursuit of liberation, she amasses lovers, debts, lies and scandals. She goes completely off the rails, and when the hopelessness of her situation becomes painfully clear to her, she takes her own life.
Gustave Flaubert's novel has gone down in literary history as the first, and one of the most important, in the genre of French Realism, and caused a scandal when it was published in 1856. It is still as stirring and highly charged today, and is still considered controversial. Depending on the perspective, Emma Bovary is either the victim or the perpetrator, either an early emancipated woman or a plaything of lust.
Margarita Broich studied photography and design, and worked as a theatre photographer with Claus Peymann in Bochum. She then studied drama at Berlin University of the Arts, and has since then performed at many theatres in Basel, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Berlin. Her film and TV career began in the early 1990s. She has played one of the inspectors in the Frankfurt-based episodes of the long-running TV crime series Tatort, with Wolfram Koch as the other half of the team, since 2015, and has also starred in the popular TV series Meine Mutter since 2018. She also continues to work as a photographer, and has published several books.
