The girls are older now, they are allowed to go out on the threshold of the house, they will even discover the forest... The confined atmosphere of the house with its strict and austere rules is broken by their encounter with another wild animal, a deer –a supreme beauty of nature.
Marcel Aymé stated of his stories that give voice to animals that they “do not seriously seek to give the illusion of reality”. The story of the stag willing to let itself be tamed by the little girls intertwines with those of the ox and Pataud the dog, forming a scenario that leads to a series of events and as many reflections on normality, friendship, toil, submission or freedom. Their adventures offer the opportunity to combine theatre and songs. “Children are not ‘tomorrow’s audience’ being trained to understand’ serious’ works that they will see later on in life”, says Véronique Vella, “rather they are an audience in their own right, and the theatre we show them, far from being edifying, must be like them: concerned with here and now. Le Cerf et le Chien is unequivocally a tale about tolerance. Each person agrees to alter his or her truth in order to live in harmony with others. It’s worth reminding ourselves of this kind of principle in the times we live in.”

Beasts of all kinds have, by the mere fact of being evoked, invaded the stage since Antiquity. At the Comédie-Française, when an animal, most often a wild animal or a bird, made the headlines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was to illustrate, metaphorically, the character of the protagonists, such as in Henry Bataille’s_Maman colibri._ And if the author makes an animal character speak, artifice must give the illusion of animality, from naturalistic costume (La Forêt mouillée, 1930) to aesthetic mask (Les Fables de La Fontaine, 2004).

From the twentieth century onwards, animal life was more present on stage in the flesh-and-blood variety. For the sake of greater realism, many animals, whether domesticated or not, have played ancillary roles, appearing on stage or even fluttering up into the fly tower: dogs, horses, ducks, butterflies, pigeons, canaries and so on.

Animals on stage or natural-born performers, the animal and the actor make the audience think about their own animality and humanity.

The porosity between animality and humanity can be made more permeable by the director who may exploit its playful potential, for example transposing the ideal city of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (The Birds, 2009) to the Place Colette, in front of the Comédie-Française (Cuckoo-on-Stage) where the “actirds” roost. Similarly, the stage goes animal when the actor transforms into a boar through theatrical illusion alone (Mystère bouffe et fabulage, 2010). In terms of costume, the animality of the character is sometimes non-existent or reduced to the strict minimum for eternally identifiable characters, for example in a corkscrew tail (The Three Little Pigs, 2012), a hand covered with fur, or antlers and fur-trimmed coat (Marcel Aymé’s Le Loup, Le Cerf et le chien, 2009 and 2016), the actor’s movements completing the metamorphosis.

Staging: Véronique Vella
Scenograhpy: Julie Camus
Costumes: Isabelle Benoist
Lights: Gaëlle de Malglaive
Sounds: Jean-Luc Ristord
Music: Vincent Leterme and Lucette-Marie Sagnières
Collaboration: Raphaëlle Saudinos
Assistant stage manager: Juliette Damy