Lucrèce Borgia

For his third staging at the Comédie-Française, following Cyrano de Bergerac, revived this season, and Fantasio, Denis Podalydès is returning to the century of romanticism with one of Victor Hugo’s masterpieces, Lucrèce Borgia, which entered the repertoire in 1918. “[...] and now mingle with all this moral deformity a pure feeling, [...] maternal love; inside your monster, put a mother and the monster will make you cry” states the preface. Antoine Vitez’s staging in Avignon in 1985 fuelled the director’s desire to follow Hugo’s lyricism so as to “better descend into this shadowy abyss that is Lucrèce Borgia, an ambivalent and subversive tragedy, a sort of monster of beauty and impropriety” and recreate the poetic violence of the incestuous drama.
The play calls for a scale of gesture, feeling and acting that accepts the ridiculous and exaggeration, that does not hold back from joining the grotesque and the sublime. “Hugo stretches this tension in every scene to accentuate contrasts. It is clearly from Shakespeare that Hugo borrowed this fundamental law of drama.” The opening scene shows a gondola in which a group of bedraggled men, their faces covered by grotesque masks, are telling the story of the infamous Borgia family, recalling how the two brothers Cesare and Juan killed each other for the love of their sister Lucretia; “the use of disguise and masks come from both the play and the desire to make a Lucretia less a dramatic heroine than an allegory of the pariah.”