La Tête des autres ・ Comédie-Française

One more head!

In the company of his wife Juliette and his colleague Bertolier, prosecutor Maillard is celebrating having given the death sentence to another defendant, a young jazz musician by the name of Valorin, but the trophy soon turns out to be threatening and troublesome. Having escaped from police, Valorin breaks into Maillard’s home––who is now alone with his mistress, Bertolier’s wife––with the intention of proclaiming his innocence and taking revenge by revealing secrets that will damage the prosecutors’ honour and careers. The real culprit turns out to be Alessandrovici, the notorious mafioso...

Marcel Aymé, the author
A novelist, storyteller, writer of short stories and screenplays, Marcel Aymé’s (1902-1967) success started with the publication of his first novel (Brûlebois) in 1926 and continued to grow through a series of works including The Hollow Field (Renaudot prize in 1929) and The Green Mare (1933). Having conquered audiences in 1948 with his first play, Lucienne and the Butcher, this lover of theatre wrote Clérambard (1950), Other People’s Heads (1952), and ten other works which, with humour and derision, deal with the most diverse genres and topics, from musical theatre to fantastical detective stories to criticism –supported by his experience as a crime journalist– of the death penalty, which was widely accepted at the time. Denouncing the compromise between justice and power, Other People’s Heads, although threatened with a ban, was premiered in a staging by André Barsacq to great success. In the light of the controversy it caused and under legal pressure, in 1956 Marcel Aymé changed the final act of his scathing black comedy.

Lilo Baur, the director
The actress and director Lilo Baur was born in Switzerland and began her career in London at the Royal National Theatre and in the Complicite company with Simon McBurney. She notably staged Gogol’s The Marriage in 2010 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, and in 2008, Fish Love after Chekhov, another author of the Russian repertoire whom she has a particular fondness. This season, she premieredThe 6th Continent with Daniel Pennac who introduced her to Other People’s Heads. Immediately taken by this acid indictment of the death penalty, corruption and the illusory equity of justice, Lilo Baur chose to stage the initial version of the play. For her, the final act, more subversive than in the second version, provides an eloquent portrait of the mafia type, a movie-style gangster.