“I don’t want to be pigeonholed” Serge Gainsbourg once said to Georges Lautner. Mission by and large accomplished: any attempt at definition would be reductive and, indeed, more than twenty-five years after his death, it could be said that everyone has their own version of Serge. Whether adulated or detested, an example or an object of scorn, he always resisted both those who wanted to sanctify him and others who would have liked to see him pilloried. Provocative? Not so sure. But there is no doubting he was a composer and author of genius.
1973, in an interview with Michel Lancelot:
“If you had to write a book on chanson?”
It would have to be made like a pupil’s copybook. That would accurately represent chanson. There’d have to be a margin and I’d be in the margin of every page.”
“I always said that the word leads me to the idea” also stated the man who, thanks to Boris Vian, came to admit that perhaps chanson was not so dishonourable after all. In the tradition of the Comédie-Française productions Comme une pierre qui... and L’Interlope (cabaret) Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux seek out the self-effacing individual and eminent specialist of the sidestep who was trained in the classical school in music as well as in painting. Gathering on stage several of their comrades from the Troupe who are also musicians and singers, they ponder the various manners in which people enter the world of “Gainsbourie”.

NEW PRODUCTION

IN DEFIANCE OF THE PROHIBITION that existed under Louis XIV to perform music and dance –this privilege being reserved to the Opera– ever since Molière’s comedy-ballets, the Théâtre-Français has constantly had its Troupe sing on stage whenever the Repertoire lends itself to such performances, if only for the couplets and songs that punctuate the plays of Beaumarchais, Marivaux or Musset. Down through its history, the Troupe has in fact included many actors who were initially trained in singing and music: Sallé (seventeenth century), Madame Thénard (eighteenth century), Mademoiselle Paradol, Marthe Brandès (nineteenth century), or Paul-Émile Deiber (twentieth century). Since 2007, the actors have regularly sung on musical radio broadcasts and since 2009 these performances have been extended at the Studio-Théâtre, transformed into a cabaret stage for the occasion. By turns they feature a thematic repertoire or are dedicated to famous performers with a love for the lyrical, such as Georges Brassens, Barbara or Boris Vian, alongside whom Serge Gainsbourg fully merits his place.
It was while attending a Vian concert in the 1950s that Serge Gainsbourg realised that he could “do something in this minor art”. Like Barbara, he went on to embrace the art of singing and composition in its broadest sense, mixing music with performance. Instead of using “real” singers, he liked to work with actresses, whom he pushed in directions which were new for them: “it created a magic that enveloped his own world”, notes former pensionnaire Isabelle Adjani. Conversely, in his rich career as a film music composer, screenwriter but also director and actor, actors did not hide their pride in being directed by this “poet of the camera” (Francis Huster) who knew them so well. In the many films he shot, he worked with several Comédiens-Français such as Francis Huster (whom he initially hired to dub an actor before casting him in Équateur), Roland Bertin (after shooting in Je t’aime moi non plus, Gainsbourg saw him on stage and offered him a major role in Charlotte For Ever), Georges Descrières (Voulez-vous danser avec moi), Robert Hirsch (Toutes folles de lui), Louis Seigner (Le Pacha), etc.

In 1962, Jean-Louis Barrault, artistic director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon at the time, appealed to Gainsbourg by giving him carte blanche to write a musical, an invitation the latter was obliged to decline and then refuse again a few years later, due to time constraints.

Even ten years after seeing Jack Gelber’s The Connection performed by the Living Theatre with the saxophonist Jackie McLean (1962), Gainsbourg still considered the beauty of this play to be unparalleled. It inspired him to write the songs Black Trombone and Coco and Co.
This season at the Studio-Théâtre, it is the turn of songs to inspire the theatrical performance.

• Visual: The musicians in Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault, 1973 – photo. Claude Angelini, coll. CF

Adaptation and staging: Stéphane Varupenne et Sébastien Pouderoux
Lights: Éric Dumas
Musical arrangements: Guillaume Bachelé, Martin Leterme, Vincent Leterme et les Serge
Sounds: Théo Jonval