For a few years now, songs have been a major component at the Comédie-Française, where musical repertoires have been explored in several ways. Guillaume Barbot has been working at the crossroads of theatre and music for fifteen years; with Art Majeur, he aims for “a true concert-theatre” made up of songs which may have changed the course of human existence, and more broadly, ideally, changed the world.
As a story buff, especially when stories are told with music, he ordered pieces from five novel writers so that each performer gets a story to tell about a song which triggered an earthshaking event in characters’ lives. This matter stemming from fiction and poetry will ring aloud in this rock’n’roll show with brand new arrangements directed by Barbot’s age-old accomplice, Pierre-Marie Braye-Weppe. The goal is also to blast out some of the tunes that are ingrained in our collective mind, from Bashung to Dalida.
New tracks, famous tracks, forgotten tracks, secret or ritual songs, family hits or memory-filled choruses; the Troupe performers, who are well-versed in music and singing, dig into the major aspects of this art: Guillaume Barbot advertised “an hour of music, a 60-minute album with sung or spoken tracks all replete with the swinging of words, voices and recordings.”

Les textes interprétés par Thierry Hancisse, Véronique Vella, Léa Lopez et Axel Auriant ont été respectivement écrits par Simon Johannin, Gilles Leroy, Pauline Delabroy-Allard et Emmanuelle Fournier-Lorentz.

NEW PRODUCTION

TICKETS CAN BE PURCHASED STARTING
JAN 24

With the generous support of Aline Foriel-Destezet, great patron of the arts.

grande ambassadrice de la création artistique

**RENCONTRE**

Nous organisons une rencontre avec le public à l'issue de la représentation du mercredi 24 avril. Elle sera animée par Laurent Muhleisen, conseiller littéraire de la Comédie-Française, en présence de Guillaume Barbot, des comédiennes et comédiens du spectacle et de Pierre-Marie Braye-Weppe, musicien.
En libre accès, avec ou sans billet pour la représentation du soir.

With La Conférence des objets, written specifically for the Comédie-Française troupe, Christine Montalbetti becomes part of an “age-old tradition”.

Molière tailored the roles he wrote for his companions, and the Comédie-Française troupe – which, up to the Revolution, enjoyed a royal monopoly over French-language performances – was a necessary source of inspiration for authors. Playwrights would therefore write for the Comédie-Française, having to submit to the supreme verdict of the actors or the Reading Committee, and to sometimes accept to make corrections to their works. During rehearsals, this rewriting work continued, with actors demanding modifications or refusing to say certain lines, sometimes even threatening to abandon their roles. For example, the actor Talma frequently collaborated with authors, in particular Ducis, not hesitating to make cuts or even to significantly modify the texts, always out of a concern for the dramaturgy. In the nineteenth century, the actress-stars who performed the tragic repertoire while triumphing in new plays inspired a new generation of writers. Indeed, a whole repertoire was written for Sarah Bernhardt and staged in her own theatre, while other authors sought to write for the great tragedian Rachel.

Productions of this type became rarer during the twentieth century, but came back in favour during the early 1980s. The administrator Jacques Toja corresponded with Bernard-Marie Koltès who confided in him his project to write “a play whose primary dramaturgical characteristic is that it is intended for a Troupe”. But the project never came to fruition.
Opportunities increased during Marcel Bozonnet’s mandate. In 2006, a work by playwright Philippe Minyana was staged, outside the repertoire, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier: La Maison des morts, written for Catherine Hiegel in 1995 – “in the familiarity of her voice” – and directed by Robert Canterella. That same year, Valère Novarina entered the Comédie-Française repertoire with L’Espace furieux, whose first staging dated to 1991 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, based on his novel Je suis. When put to the test of the Salle Richelieu stage, two scenes were rewritten. The resulting changes and adjustments produced “waves that modified the physics and language of the play”, requiring the publication of a new edition. This work on writing continued with Muriel Mayette-Holtz who asked an author, Emmanuel Darley, and a director, Andrés Lima, to place their pens at the service of actors from the Troupe willing to engage in the exercise of improvisation during a ten-day workshop. This collaboration gave rise to the production Bonheur? at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2008.

In 2017, at the request of Éric Ruf, Pascal Rambert wrote and directed Une vie at Le Vieux-Colombier. This work was conceived especially for the voices, bodies and energies of six actors from the Troupe and one child, because “that’s where plays are born. From actors. From that nocturnal dream we have every evening before we drop from tiredness. We fall asleep with these voices. We sleep with these bodies. We rewrite with them in our sleep.”

In 2017-2018, two playwrights were once again invited to write for and with the Troupe, creating productions whose contours were drawn and refined as the rehearsals progressed: David Lescot for Les Ondes magnétiques (Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier) and Lars Norén for Poussière (Salle Richelieu).

This season, Christine Montalbetti wishes there to be “a kind of joyful obviousness” to the Comédie-Française actors embodying the objects she chose for them after meeting and developing individual scores for each one of them.

• Espace furieux - photo. Thierry Gründler © Coll. Comédie-Française

Directed by: Guillaume Barbot
Dramaturgy: Agathe Peyrard
Scenography: Benjamin Lebreton
Costumes: Aude DésigauxLighting: Nicolas Faucheux
Musical direction and arrangements: Pierre-Marie Braye-Weppe
Sound: Julien Reboux
Assistant musical director: Valentin Martel

and
Axel Auriant
Pierre-Marie Braye-Weppe: music