Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée

An immediate success when premiered in 1848, this proverb in an act was performed every year at the Comédie-Française from 1910 to 1970 but has not been revived since 1980.For his first staging with the Troupe, which he knows well, having assisted many directors, including Ivo van Hove for the production of Les Damnées programmed this season, Laurent Delvert has chosen this play that he has carried with him for nearly twenty years. “I grew up with it”, he says. He sets Musset’s dialogues in a loft-workshop space, a modern salon steeped in urban unrest, a floating island conducive to bringing out the intimate and social issues of the meeting between the Marquise and the Count who doesn’t dare to ask for her hand. But that day, by a happy coincidence of bad weather or perhaps as the result of female wiles, he is the only one invited to her home. So opens a verbal joust, a “magnificent and sensual if not to say feral confrontation, in which tension and desire mingle”. Laurent Delvert is equally interested in our acts of resistance and in how we let our lives glide gently by without making choices. “Would you close that door!” Repeats the young woman, exhorting her suitor to surrender himself to the “unknown”...