・ Comédie-Française

In 7 minutes, a committee of female workers must give its opinion on a measure proposed by the new management. Their choral discussion evolves from the beginning to the end of the play, and a collective thinking emerges from this democratic debate. Such collective scenes, performed in real time, are quite rare in the theatrical repertoire – Stefano Massini’s play brings to mind the Sidney Lumet film Twelve Angry Men, released in 1957 and also adapted for the theatre, in which 12 jurors confined in a room must decide on a patricide case.
Political and democratic bodies (the Roman Senate, the National Assembly during the French Revolution) are represented on stage more than social subjects – such as the one depicted in in 7 minutes – which are very marginal in the Comédie-Française’s repertoire.

There are many plays evoking the political assemblies of the Roman republic, although few of them actually feature debates. Senators, tribunes and consuls thus feature on stage in a large number of Roman tragedies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shakespeare’s Coriolan, premiered in 1934 in a staging by the general administrator Émile Fabre, stirred political tensions at a time when France was in the midst of a parliamentary crisis: it was seen as a fascist play that was very critical of the democratic process. The French National Assembly or the Revolutionary Tribunal are in the background of plays situated during the French Revolution, or even serve as the subject of tableaux represented on stage such as in Le Sang de Danton by Saint-Georges de Bouhelier (5th tableau, Le Tribunal révolutionnaire).

Social themes dealing with conflicts, strikes, negotiations and power relations between the different classes are not very well represented at the Comédie-Française, although they have been preferential subjects on other stages, particularly in the late nineteenth century. André Antoine, devoted his theatre to defending the working classes, staging works such as Fernand Icres’ Les Bouchers (1888), Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers (1893) or Paul Adam and André Picard’s Le Cuivre (1895). At the Comédie-Française at the same time, in a bourgeois theatre, the repertoire alluded to social conflicts more than it represented them: only François Coppée’s La Grève des forgerons (1897) addressed such subject matter head-on, but more often than not such themes remained in the background when evoked, such as in Henry Kistemaeckers’L’Embuscade (1913), a comedy of morals based on a social intrigue (the threat of a strike in the Guéret automobile factories).

7 minutes

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