Mrs Lemarchand: a well-to-do woman and a study in meglomania, draws her innocent cleaner, Hilda, into a trap from which there is no escape. Hilda’s life and her marriage to the hapless Frank, is destroyed by Mrs Lemarchand’s spiralling obsessions. Marie NDiaye is a 33 year-old novelist whose work explores poverty in everyday life by pushing it to extremes. She shook France’s literary circles with her latest novel Rosie Carpe which subsequently won the ‘Prix Femina’. Hilda is her first and only play to date. Hilda is part of the National Theatre’s Channels project, a series of contemporary French plays read in translation at the Lyttleton in June 2002.