EN TOURNÉE / Le Soulier de satin

As a seminal literary, theatre, and audience-oriented work, Le Soulier de Satin, written from 1918 to 1923, only premiered at the Comédie-Française in 1943 in a production directed by Jean-Louis Barrault, who went through immense trouble and faced many risks to be granted Claudel’s authorisation and perform the play in German-occupied France.This “love drama”, which takes place over the course of 20 years laid out in four days, tells the story of Rodrigo and Prouhèze, the wife of governor Don Pélage, in the era of conquistadors and explorations of vaguely-known seas. “We eagerly and humbly tackled this era, said Éric Ruf, exploring the secret hidden by the poet within these four Days, or the way Claudel inscribed his illicit relationships into skilful yet personal writing.” The director is used to dealing with Claudel’s writing style, in all its musicality and brilliance, and considers it to be extremely sensible. It is deployed within a set designed to highlight the age-old connexion between the apparatus used in theatre and sailing, using the play’s foreword as a starting point: “Everything must seem temporary, in progress, sloppy, incoherent, enthusiastically improvised, and the result must include some successful parts, if possible, to avoid being tedious even in agitation. Order is the delight of sound minds, and mess is imagination’s treat.” For this 7-hour-long production, directed with Éric Ruf’s 2012 Peer Gynt in mind, joy is the thread that ties this humongous group play together.