It was first performed on stage in 1943 (abridged), in a production by Claudel and Jean-Louis Barrault.
[1] Its full running time is roughly eleven hours.
The play is a love story dominated by the ideas of sin and redemption and the various characters, some divine and some comic, frequently engage in a dialogue as though between Heaven and Earth.
Nowadays it is rarely staged, because of its extreme length and its challenging production requirements.
It was made into a seven-hour film in 1985 by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.