L'Avare ・ Comédie-Française

Harpagon plans to marry off his daughter Élise – without a dowry – to a rich merchant old enough to be her father, and his son Cléante to a wealthy widow.

Obviously, neither of them wants to go through with it. As the author of the play, Molière, who played the part of Harpagon when L’Avare (The Miser) premiered in 1668 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, took the side of young love against paternal authority. Valère, the man Elise is in love with, infiltrates the household masquerading as a servant, while Cléante pines after Mariane, oblivious to the fact his father intends to marry her. The theme of forced marriage is completed by that of father-son conflicts and the quest for eternal youth, a noteworthy fact according to Lilo Baur, who has already directed Feydeau’s Puce à l’oreille on that very stage, and who is currently working on Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which will premiere at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier at the end of the season. She set the play by Lake Geneva, her birthplace, during the post-war years, a period close to us but still far from today’s standards regarding the emancipation of women, from parents and from society. She draws the threads of her lively production from this unscrupulous usurer who keeps his wealth in a chest, “just like the big banks, with all those gold bars and jewels locked up in safes as if in mausoleums”. Gifted with overflowing imagination when it comes to directing, she incorporates improv to her work to exploit the situational comedy of legendary scenes, from the rifling through the valet’s pockets to the stolen chest, and highlights “the exacerbated feelings of youth, whether inlove or in rage”.