In front of a heavy purple velvet curtain, the silhouette of a woman, wearing sunglasses and a glamorous wide-brimmed straw hat, twirled around, tangling herself up in a sheet. She was both beautiful and absurd, a star and a fool. "Does it come across clearly that she's tied down?" asked Camille Cottin to her director, Jonathan Capdevielle. "I’d like to convey the image of confinement." After several minutes of wrestling with the sheet, the actress finally gave up. The pair decided that it was too late to perfect the idea for tonight's rehearsal, but they promised to resolve it before the performances at Paris's Bouffes du Nord theater, which are scheduled to begin on January 7.

That Wednesday, December 18, Cottin was rehearsing the play Le Rendez-Vous ("The Appointment") on the stage of the southern city of Arles' theater. The show was created in September, in the nearby city of Aix-en-Provence. Adapted from the novel Jewish Cock by German author Katharina Volckmer, the play is a monologue featuring a woman who visits her gynecologist to request a circumcised penis graft. The text is a fierce, feminist, provocative, and funny "monster" of a piece. Capdevielle described it as "a caress and a slap," tackling themes such as German guilt linked to the Holocaust, God, the love of theater, gender transition, and, of course, men – more specifically, their penises, which the author refers to as "cocks."

When Cottin read the first page of the novel, nearly four years ago, she paused and wondered aloud: "What the hell is this thing?" She put the book down, as if needing to take a deep breath, before diving back into it. Later, when she asked literary agents for film script ideas with strong female roles to take on, Jewish Cock was the first piece sent to her. Unsure how to approach this bombshell of a play, she sent a copy to her mother, Edith – a keen reader, whose opinion she values – and another to her best friend, Benjamin Gauthier, an actor and director. Both responded enthusiastically. "It's an essential text," insisted Gauthier, who immediately urged her to adapt it for the stage.

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