Twelfth Night or What you Will

SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES were added late to the Repertoire. HIs eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adapters were primarily interested in tragic plots, modifying them as they saw fit to suit French tastes. George Sand was the first to adapt a comedy, As You Like It, in 1856. The Taming of the Shrew was subsequently adapted by Paul Delair in 1891, entirely recomposed around four characters.
From the 1920s on, these comedies were performed in more accurate translations: Twelfth Night, staged by Jacques Copeau in 1940, in the translation by Theodore Lascaris, The Winter’s Tale, translated by Claude-André Puget in 1950, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapted by Pierre Charras in 1965, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in the French text by Jean-Louis Curtis in 1974, The Merchant of Venice, in Jean-Michel Déprats’ translation in 1987, The Tempest in Xavier Maurel’s version in 1998, The Merry Wives of Windsor in Jean-Michel Déprats’ translation in 2009, and Troilus and Cressida in André Markowitz’s translation in 2013. But many of Shakespeare’s famous comedies are still absent from the Comédie-Française’s Repertoire, such as The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Twelfth Night, on the other hand, is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed comedies with three productions predating Thomas Ostermeier’s staging.
Jacques Copeau added it to the Repertoire on 23 December 1940 amidst a very tense national and internal context for the Comédie-Française. Paris was occupied by the Germans, the theatres were closed and then reopened but had to deal with the new authorities. In April, the General Administrator Édouard Bourdet was hospitalised following a traffic accident. Jacques Copeau, an avant-garde director, member of the famous “Cartel” and founder of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, was called upon to act as interim Administrator. In December, rumours spread that he wanted to permanently oust Bourdet, which Copeau denied in the press, assuring that Bourdet himself had been in favour of his appointment, which became effective on 30 December. The staging of Twelfth Night therefore took place under very political circumstances.

The choice of the play was not insignificant for Jacques Copeau, at a moment when he was trying to make his mark. He was in fact returning to one of his favourite plays, the one that made his name in 1914 when he founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. His style contrasted radically with the stagings of the time, which still bore the imprint of bourgeois and naturalistic comedy. “Stripped back” was the watchword for this new vision of the stage, and of this production, which was revived after the war. But in 1940, the new production at the Comédie-Française was much more sumptuous and entrancing than the bare trestle of the Vieux-Colombier (Suzanne Reymond’s set reproduced the gallery of an Elizabethan theatre, the costumes were by Marie-Hélène Dasté). Critics also highlighted the dominant tone of “buffoonery”, which turned the Comédie-Française into a “frenetic Punch and Judy show”, a “feast for the eyes and ears” judged to be occasionally somewhat excessive (Georges Pioch, L’Œuvre, 28 December 1940). This time, the production failed to charm and most critics were nostalgic for the performances of the Vieux-Colombier.

The second Twelfth Night presented at the Comédie-Française was just as memorable. During the 1960s, the Comédie-Française thought about having an English director stage “le grand Will”: the names of Laurence Olivier, Peter Brook and Orson Welles were mentioned. Pierre Dux chose a promising young director, Terry Hands, was co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and artistic director of the Stratford Festival, and who had already directed Richard III and Pericles Prince of Tyre for the Comédie-Française. In 1976, he staged Twelfth Night at the Odéon with the Comédie-Française troupe (text by Jean-Louis Curtis). He saw the play as an inevitable chain reaction, a finely-tuned machine of fate that could not be stopped. In Hands’ view, and as Thomas Ostermeier –director of the fourth Twelfth Night at the Comédie-Française– also states, Shakespeare is obsessed with the question of genres and totally challenges the generally accepted concordance between sexual orientation and desire. Love plays out physically between individuals, more than psychologically: “In matters of love, the ambiguity is not about morality. The main thing is to show that each character is homothetic to the others: this is what Shakespeare suggests by introducing twins, by multiplying disguises. All the characters identify love with the realisation of a strictly material and physical project. The only real passion that emerges in this play, deliberately deprived of any lyricism, is that of Orsino for his page, because the fact she is dressed as a man hides the woman from him so he just sees her as a human being. Shakespeare, in short, engages in a virulent satire of phallocratic and women’s liberation theories.” (Quoted by Claude Baignières, Le Figaro, 26 February 1976). In keeping with this vision, Terry Hands fitted the stage with a simple riser to leave it open to the costumed actors, returning to the stripped-down approach adopted by Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.

The third Night was Andrzej Seweryn’s in 2003 (translation by Jean-Michel Déprats). The Polish director, a sociétaire of the Comédie-Française, considered that in his country, Shakespeare is seen as the most Polish of foreign authors. He conceived his staging as the triumph of ambiguity: “This confusion of desire, the central subject of the play, strikes me as very topical. In our image-centred civilisation, we only believe what we see. But what are we beyond image?” (Quoted by Marion Thébaud, Le Figaro, 11 September 2003). Rudy Sabounghi’s set, which establishes multiple levels with the help of a footbridge that runs the length of the stage, lets the audience follow the adventures of the Duke and Olivia simultaneously, in a montage reminiscent of cinematographic techniques.