It features the mythology that runs through all his work and surrounds his life: the fascination for criminals, masculinity, self-realisation, fate and desire. The action focuses on three young prisoners. The first, named Yeux Verts (Green Eyes), acharismatic figure, is a “true”murderer venerated by two delinquents, Maurice, with his angel face and troubling beauty, and Lefranc, the only one in the cell who is not illiterate and therefore has the privilege of reading and writing the correspondence between Yeux Verts and his wife –the absent figure who is the common object of fantasy.
It required a enthusiast and an accomplished practitioner of Genet’s work to stage this dense and poetic drama restricted to the confines of a prison cell. Cédric Gourmelon has already staged Splendid’s, Le Funambule and Le Condamné à mort, a poem set to music by Étienne Daho. Haute surveillance is one of his favourite texts, which he is directing for the third time in this production. He leads theactors of the Troupe into the underside of this text, which demands an intense physical commitment. Together, they grapple with the unique style of an author who gives voice, and a form of nobility, to bad boys like himself banished from society. There lies the immense talent of Genet’s theatre: “it is polite with regard to matter, it gives song to that which was mute”.

Similarly to great men, famous criminals occupy a prominent place in romantic and theatrical fictions. For Diderot, the staging of crime brings us back to the originalpower of the Greek theatre. When depicted on stage, the brutality of Nero, Macbethand company,asbrought to life by Shakespeare and the French tragedians,explodes before the eyes of the audience. The manner in which it has been handled aesthetically hasvaried over the centuries, consisting primarily in blurring the original violence while preserving its essence.

From the nineteenth century onwards, classical tragedy became grounded in everyday life, bringing to the stage criminals who were close to their contemporaries. Newspaper stories became a source of inspiration for the theatre industry, in particular in the theatres of the so-called Boulevard of crime and on the stage of the Grand Guignol. At the Comédie-Française, despite antecedents such as Marc-Antoine Legrand’s depiction of the famous brigand Cartouche in Cartouche ou Les Voleurs (1721), petty criminals did not come to the fore until the 1980s, drawn out of the shadows by Brecht, Genet, Koltès, Bond, etc. The author of Les Bonnes(The Maids) who transfigured the sisters Papin,confined the audience’s view to a cell shared by three prisonersin Haute Surveillance (Deathwatch).

Confinement is not a new theme in the Repertoire, going back as far as Les Victimes cloîtrées (Monvel, 1791). The troupe has tackled it more recently in Sartre (Huis clos, Les Séquestrés d’Altona), demonstrating how it exacerbates violence, a violence that Genet subversive lyrenders common place.

Staging: Cédric Gourmelon
Scenography: Mathieu Lorry-Dupuy
Costumes: Cidalia Da Costa
Lights: Arnaud Lavisse
Assistant stage manager: Morgann Cantin-Kermarrec