Britannicus

“MY TRAGEDY is no less about the disgrace of Agrippine than the death of Britannicus.” This is how Racine defines Britannicus in his preface. For the author, the political subject and family conflict are therefore just as important as the pathos of Britannicus, however the sensibilities of the public of the time tended to contradict this stance. Indeed, the reason he chose to name his play after a secondary character was because the public of his time was moved by touchingly tragic figures, of which Britannicus is the archetype.

While the play’s subject is political, it was also political due to the context of its creation. The preparation of this event played out in the salons where Racine read his first Roman play inspired by Tacitus and Suetonius, and where rumour hinted that he has outdone himself, writing the greatest tragedy of his time. It was even said that this play would quite simply wipe away all previous tragedies –especially those of Corneille– causing a genuine literary coup d’état. When it was premiered on 13 December 1669 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, it was in fact targeted by a cabal, and was in competition with a capital execution. It was political also for the manner in which the critics seized upon the play to suggest that it showed Louis XIV had found a reason to renounce one of his favourite pleasures, dance, marking a shift in the regime towards an overt austerity. In this he follows Narcissus, who reports to Nero that the Romans criticise his taste and his practice of the theatre, seen as incompatible with the exercise of power.

The history of the role of Britannicus is very strongly determined by the balance established by actors in the casting of the play. Initially, the character of the title was considered as the hero by spectators fond of weepy tragedies. The audience demanded that Floridor, a widely appreciated actor who played Nero in the first production, leave this detestable role for fear of being “obliged to wish harm upon him”. The relationship was inverted in 1757 when Le Kain took on the role of the emperor. His temperament incited him to play Nero as a totally wilful tyrant rather than stick to the subdued portrait of the “nascent monster”.
Talma probably borrowed a great deal from Le Kain’s interpretation, but accentuated the character’s maturity and the impression of terror he inspires. In 1872, Émile Perrin’s new staging combined the talents of Mounet-Sully (Nero), Madame Arnoult-Plessy (Agrippine) and Sarah Bernhardt (Junie): “wild sensuality” and “diabolical outburst of joy” is what the actor noted in his copy of the play. The ferocity of the character was accentuated, veering into madness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the most striking performance was by De Max, who took on all the details of the character’s eccentricity, both in costume and in decadent attitude, suggesting an incestuous relationship with his mother.

In the period before the era of the director, the interpretations oscillated between the “nascent monster” approach (De Max) and that of the tyrant in maturity (Le Kain, Talma), but all contributed to making Nero the true hero of the play at the expense of Britannicus, politics triumphing over pathos.

It wasn’t until 1952 and Jean Marais’s staging of Britannicus that the Comédie-Française broke with its old ways. Having just been appointed as a pensionnaire destined for roles of the “princes of tragedy” type, the omnipotent Marais was took charge of directing, sets and costumes for the production while also playing the role of Nero opposite Marie Bell’s Agrippine. What was seen as a power grab within the first theatre of France resonated oddly with the subject of the tragedy. Marais was booed and resigned a few months later.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to this aborted attempt to open up the institution, Michel Vitold’s 1961 staging gave two immense actors of the Comédie-Française the chance to take on characters from outside of their usual comic roles in what turned out to be a highly convincing duel: Annie Ducaux as Agrippine and Robert Hirsch as Nero.
Jean-Pierre Miquel’s reading in 1978 approached the play from a purely political angle, totally avoiding the psychoanalytical background that had dominated literary criticism in recent years (notably in the writings of Roland Barthes). It featured Jean-Luc Boutté as a cold and calculating Nero, Denise Gence (Agrippine), but also Francis Huster (Britannicus).
In 1989, Jean-Luc Boutté in turn presented his take on the play. Richard Fontana played Nero, alongside Françoise Seigner, again cast against type as Agrippine. He took the opposite approach to Miquel’s reading ten years earlier, emphasising the development of the passions, the “nascent monster” in Nero, the political dimension being treated as intrinsic to the play.
The most recent production to date is that of Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2004. Alexandre Pavloff played Nero and Dominique Constanza Agrippine, both haunted by an incestuous relationship. The director conceived the play as a meditation on evil and tyranny, in their most universal dimension. As for Stéphane Braunschweig, he sees the intertwining of political stakes and passionate motives as the heart of Racinian tragedy –and all the more so of Britannicus. Attentive to the sudden twists of the play, he wishes to stage the play as a clash between high-risk power calculations and the unpredictability of the emotions.