La Musica, La Musica deuxième (1965-1985) ・ Comédie-Française

The heir to the great masters of Russian theatre, Anatoli Vasilyev has strong links with the Comédie-Française for having staged Lermontov’s Masquerade in 1992, a production that caused quite a stir, and Molière’s Amphitryon in 2002.

A major figure of theatrical research, he explores gesture and the spoken word, every intonation becoming a challenge to stretch words like arrows. The high standards he sets are equal to his almost mystical approach to drama: the actor is the purveyor of a divine inspiration, speech is action. And the spoken word is the backbone of the La Musica deuxième: a dialogue between a man and a woman in the privacy of a hotel bar in a provincial town. They once loved each other and have met to finalise the act of separation, their divorce. Things that had been left unsaid resurface during this final exploration of a story they thought they had understood from beginning to end. Twenty years after La Musica, Marguerite Duras wrote an “act 2” in 1985: “La Musica was no longer a situation, a state of love becoming undone. With the second act I think I introduce what you call characters”, the author commented when it was first produced. Anatoli Vasiliev comes up with a new partition of this diptych in which the characters, as Duras describes, experience “an inner shift towards the greatest truth, the greatest sincerity”.

Creative team

Mise en scène : Anatoli Vassiliev
Scénographie et lumières : Anatoli Vassiliev et Philippe Lagrue
Costumes : Renato Bianchi
Son : Dominique Bataille
Collaboration artistique : Natalia Isaeva
Collaboration artistique aux mouvements : Boaz Trinker
Assistante à la mise en scène : Hélène Bensoussan