Dom Juan ・ Comédie-Française

Written when Molière was looking for a hit to compensate for the banning of Tartuffe, the play opens with Don Juan fleeing Elvira, whom he lured away from her vows of fidelity to God.

Over the course of the five acts, he constantly appals his faithful valet, Sganarelle, seducing and abandoning, driving a beggar to blasphemy, making a mockery of the values of his father and all those around him, and even daring to make a sacrilegious invitation to the statue of a commander he once killed.
Emmanuel Daumas, who knows the Troupe well, having already staged Marguerite Duras, Voltaire and Marivaux at the Comédie-Française, returns to the essence of the play with this Dom Juan for five performers, on a bare set and in simple costumes enlivened with wigs and make-up. He returns to the theatre of the trestle stage and embraces all the grandeur of the myth of this libertine atheist who, caught up in a world of lies and illusions, throws in his lot with life. Molière’s genius, as the director sees it, is to reveal the dark side of this hero, like Vittorio Gassman in Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso. His monstrous charm nevertheless has the benefit of revealing false ideas, amidst a chorus of characters who know no Doubt who try to make him untrue to himself by force: “Molière paints a baroque reverie, a Spanish comedy, where a man in the eye of the storm of an unreal world, not always so distant from our own, invents his life so that it has no limits. Therefore spouting dogma will not be enough to stop him. We will have to bring out the heavy artillery, witchcraft and wonder.... The machinery of theatre. The illusion of Hell.”
Emmanuel Daumas

Comedy in 5 acts

Work first performed: 15 February 1665 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal
Comédie-Française premiere: 15 January 1847 in the Salle Richelieu
813 performances of the work by the Comédie-Française since the premiere.

New production

Mise en scène dans un dispositif bifrontal