Yet beneath the accumulated layers hides a black sun of political decadence and family hatreds, rich in complex and insular characters, far removed from the romantic reading to which the play has been reduced. “The collective imagination concerning the repertoire fascinates me”, comments Éric Ruf. In attempting to understand the reasons for the play’s romantic image, he discovered “a sort of ghost play, a myth so present in people’s minds that it has become self-perpetuating and centred on itself”. Indeed, this tragedy that contains some delectable moments of comedy is a play of contrasts, depicting the naivety of lovelorn teenagers, whose fervent love stems from prescience, along with the programmed violence of the Montagues and Capulets that is bloodying Verona, both families driven by an ancestral grudge whose very meaning escapes them.
Situating the action under the blazing sun of southern Italy, a part of the world where tempers easily flare, a poor Italy where dilapidated walls bear witness to a lost grandeur and where irrational fears and popular beliefs remain strong, the director unleashes the extraordinary profusion of Shakespeare’s language in all its roughness, luxuriance and humour. It is very much the author of both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth that we find here.

ATTENTION

• Dates supplémentaires : 10, 13, 15, 19, 24, 25 juillet à 20h30 et le 1er juillet à 14h

Long perceived as being in contradiction with the French theatrical tradition, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, like the whole of the foreign repertoire, reached us through the filter of its adaptations and translations. The authors who adapted his plays sought to reconcile the richness of the story with codes acceptable to an audience that, since Voltaire, had oscillated between fascination and repulsion towards Shakespeare.

The case of Romeo and Juliet at the Comédie-Française is particularly edifying in this respect; while the play has been very rarely performed there, with no new production between 1954 and 2015, the archives of the reading committee show that it was very frequently proposed by authors-adapters who wished to take on with the myth. Since the end of the eighteenth century, there have been numerous rewrites and adaptations, each author re-appropriating history and presenting his version to the reading committee of the Comédie-Française with mixed success. Jean-François Ducis began writing his tragedy “imitated from the English”. The play was first performed on the stage of the Comédie-Française on 27 July 1772: Montaigu was the true hero of this totally revised version of the tragedy, inspired both by Shakespeare and Dante.

A new production in 1827 closed after three performances. Not long after, the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was at the centre of a quarrel between rival schools and played a prominent role in the lead-up to the “battle of Hernani”. Victor Hugo believed in the 1828 version of the play jointly written by Émile Deschamps and Alfred de Vigny, hoping that it would spark the Romantic revolution. The actors supported it overwhelmingly it but in the end it was the staunchly classicist version by Frédéric Soulié that entered the Repertoire in 1832. It was not performed beyond the premiere. While the story of Romeo and Juliet was immensely popular in the field of iconography, the actors did not dare to stage the play again. However, there were many requests from authors: no fewer than eight adaptations were proposed from 1852 to 1916. The comments of the manuscript readers speak volumes: the subject has been sufficiently “exploited”, “there is no reason to come back to it”. It was not until 1920 that the administrator Albert Carré commissioned a play by André Rivoire,Juliette et Roméo, staged the same year. Apart from the duels and bravura pieces, the play came across as very bland, no more than a literary exercise. In 1938, the version by Jean Sarment definitively took us away from free adaptation. He simplified the play while remaining faithful to the text and could boast that he finally brought the play into the Comédie-Française Repertoire in 1952. It was performed 68 times from 1952 to 1954 but not revived thereafter until 2015.

Staging and scenography: Éric Ruf
Costumes**:** Christian Lacroix
Light: Bertrand Couderc
Choregraphy**:** Glysleïn Lefever
Music: Vincent Leterme
Souns: Jean-Luc Ristord
Make-up: Carole Anquetil
Artistic collaboration: Léonidas Strapatsakis
Assistant stage manager: Alison Hornus
Assistant scenography: Dominique Schmitt