In adapting this novel, winner of the 2016 Prix Goncourt, Pauline Bayle –who came to attention for her stagings of The Iliad and The Odyssey– delves into the most contemporary intimacy after three years spent working on the great founding myths. Inspired by events that occurred in New York in 2012, Chanson douce [Lullaby] tells the story of Louise, who is hired as a babysitter by a hipster Parisian couple, becomes an essential part of their home and, not long after, murders their children. What drove the Mary Poppins-like nanny, immediately adopted by the children and adored by the parents, to commit this crime? How did she manage to make herself indispensable and how did the relationship of dependency become reversed and close in on her? The character of the nanny gives the director the opportunity to approach a central figure in the theatrical repertoire that recurs from Aeschylus and Euripides to Jean Genet’s The Maids. Louise’s story is the perfect mix between Flaubert’s tale, A Simple Heart, one of her bedside books, and the fate of Medea. According to Pauline Bayle, the novel’s impact stems from the fact that it is free from sentimentality and never black and white. In Louise, a sort of ogress of disconcerting fragility, and the parents, torn between the utopia of family happiness and the desire for professional fulfillment, she finds modern characters who redefine the codes of the master-slave relationship. Beyond anecdote, she highlights the irony inherent to this unfiltered depiction of our worst nightmare occurring when we assume people are generally good. Drawing on her customary skill in constructing intrigues, she takes hold of this tragic fable to offer a variation on the figure of the monster and its ambivalences.

NEW PRODUCTION

« Chanson douce » de Leïla Slimani, publié aux Editions Gallimard, a été récompensé notamment du prix Goncourt en 2016.
Coréalisation Comédie-Française, Studio-Théâtre / Espace 1789 ; producteur délégué Studio-Théâtre.

Rencontre avec Leïla Slimani et Pauline Bayle le vendredi 29 mars à l'issue de la représentation animée par Laurent Muhleisen.

RATHER THAN THE CONDITION OF SERVITUDE, the omnipresence of masters and valets in the theatre reflects the place of each in society. They appear in many plays in the Repertoire, from Antiquity to Genet and up the recent adaptation of Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, as well as featuring in Beaumarchais, Feydeau, Courteline, Brecht, Ionesco and so on. Nonetheless, a valet tends to fare better when the character is penned by an author of comedies who frequently plays the servant’s clumsiness for laughs and makes them an essential cog in the drama thanks to their role as confidant! Building on the contribution of Spanish comedy in which the buffoonish valet Sancho Panza plays the leading role, Moliere particularly emphasises servant roles in his theatre. Some of these servants even lend their names to the titles of his plays, such as Sganarelle ou Le Cocu imaginaire and Les Fourberies de Scapin. And in the following centuries, the servants of T_he Marriage of Figaro_ or Ruy Blas even became heroes who embodied the people. The eighteenth century contestation of the social order was reflected in particular by L’Île des esclaves (Marivaux).

With the exception of authors such as Marivaux who play on the inversion of social conditions, servants did not benefit from this emancipation until the twentieth century. In The Maids (Genet), the relationship between servants and masters goes beyond social protest to be expressed as a visceral hatred.

Female servants were also conflated with nannies until the early seventeenth century. While apparently active in the play, the character of Dorine (in Molière’s Tartuffe) does not influence the course of events. Among the famous nanny figures in the Repertoire, we can mention old Anfisa, the embodiment of the “Russian soul” (Chekhov’s Three Sisters), Antigone’s comforting nanny (Anouilh), or the precious intermediary between Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare). Conversely, by inciting Phèdre to reveal her feelings, Oenone unwittingly causes the death of the latter and Hippolyte (Racine) while Margret, the Captain’s nurse, diabolically leads him to death (Strindberg’s The Father).

The adaptation of the novel Chanson douce (Lullaby), inspired by newspaper article about a nanny who murdered the children in her care, adds to a long repertoire of plays featuring infanticide, but in this staging the Comédie-Française discovers a completely new profile of murderer. While the young Iphigenia barely escapes being sacrificed by her father (Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis), the children of the avenging Medea (Euripides) or of Pasolini’s suicidal mother (Orgy) do not survive. The young Edouard V and Richard, aged 13 and 9, are murdered in their sleep by their uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who is eager to seize power (Édouard de Delavigne’s Les Enfants). And Jean, the dreamy child delivered by a woman to Gilles de Rais (a character bearing the same name as the bloodthirsty medieval killer), will never return from the drive he takes in a Bugatti (Audureau’s L’Élégant Profil d’une Bugatti sous la lune). Similarly, this season, neither Mila nor Adam, savagely torn from life by the “ideal” nanny chosen to look after them, will ever again listen to a lullaby (Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce).

• Visual: Monsieur Thénard, role of Sganarelle, in Le Médecin malgré lui by Molière, drawn and engraved by Jean Duplessi-Berteaux, [1807-1808] – Coll. CF

Adaptation et staging: Pauline Bayle
Scenography: Pauline Bayle et Gaspard Pinta
Costumes: Bernadette Villard
Lights: Pascal Noël
Artistic collaboration**:** Isabelle Antoine