Les Ondes magnétiques ・ Comédie-Française

On 9 November 1981, French law no. 81-994 was enacted. Radio stations were finally allowed to broadcast freely.

The newly elected President, François Mitterrand, put an end to the State monopoly of broadcasting established at the Liberation. Since his election, pirate radios had proliferated, so much so that one year later nearly 2,000 free radios were listed. Through the revolution of the airwaves, the author and director David Lescot portrays the state of the nation in the early 1980s, the first three years of the left in power in France until the country veered into a period of austerity: “Using the stage to show a free radio, its clandestine creation, its forbidden and subsequently legal existence, its transformation. How the history of France in this period and the destiny of the radio are superimposed, how one can talk about one through the other. Telling the story of this utopian, fantasised period is also a way of looking at ourselves from a certain distance.” After adapting Karl Kraus’ TheLast Days of Mankind in 2016 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, David Lescot returns to work with the Troupe on a text specially written for it, to decrypt an era, that of his youth, “in the manner of an aesthetic manifesto in which art and life are inextricably intertwined”, he states. At a time when the Internet has become a new emblem, what remains of our utopias and this great liberation of the airwaves?

Creative team

Staging: David Lescot
Scenography: Alwyne de Dardel
Costumes: Mariane Delayre
Lights: Paul Beaureilles
Original music : Anthony Capelli and David Lescot
Sounds: Anthony Capelli
Make-up and wigs****: Catherine Bloquère
Artistic collaboration: Linda Blanchet
Historical advice: Anaïs Kien
Assistant scenography: Gala Ognibene

Calendar