Chanson douce

RATHER THAN THE CONDITION OF SERVITUDE, the omnipresence of masters and valets in the theatre reflects the place of each in society. They appear in many plays in the Repertoire, from Antiquity to Genet and up the recent adaptation of Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, as well as featuring in Beaumarchais, Feydeau, Courteline, Brecht, Ionesco and so on. Nonetheless, a valet tends to fare better when the character is penned by an author of comedies who frequently plays the servant’s clumsiness for laughs and makes them an essential cog in the drama thanks to their role as confidant! Building on the contribution of Spanish comedy in which the buffoonish valet Sancho Panza plays the leading role, Moliere particularly emphasises servant roles in his theatre. Some of these servants even lend their names to the titles of his plays, such as Sganarelle ou Le Cocu imaginaire and Les Fourberies de Scapin. And in the following centuries, the servants of The Marriage of Figaro or Ruy Blas even became heroes who embodied the people. The eighteenth century contestation of the social order was reflected in particular by L’Île des esclaves (Marivaux).

With the exception of authors such as Marivaux who play on the inversion of social conditions, servants did not benefit from this emancipation until the twentieth century. In The Maids (Genet), the relationship between servants and masters goes beyond social protest to be expressed as a visceral hatred.

Female servants were also conflated with nannies until the early seventeenth century. While apparently active in the play, the character of Dorine (in Molière’s Tartuffe) does not influence the course of events. Among the famous nanny figures in the Repertoire, we can mention old Anfisa, the embodiment of the “Russian soul” (Chekhov’s Three Sisters), Antigone’s comforting nanny (Anouilh), or the precious intermediary between Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare). Conversely, by inciting Phèdre to reveal her feelings, Oenone unwittingly causes the death of the latter and Hippolyte (Racine) while Margret, the Captain’s nurse, diabolically leads him to death (Strindberg’s The Father).

The adaptation of the novel Chanson douce (Lullaby), inspired by newspaper article about a nanny who murdered the children in her care, adds to a long repertoire of plays featuring infanticide, but in this staging the Comédie-Française discovers a completely new profile of murderer. While the young Iphigenia barely escapes being sacrificed by her father (Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis), the children of the avenging Medea (Euripides) or of Pasolini’s suicidal mother (Orgy) do not survive. The young Edouard V and Richard, aged 13 and 9, are murdered in their sleep by their uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who is eager to seize power (Édouard de Delavigne’s Les Enfants). And Jean, the dreamy child delivered by a woman to Gilles de Rais (a character bearing the same name as the bloodthirsty medieval killer), will never return from the drive he takes in a Bugatti (Audureau’s L’Élégant Profil d’une Bugatti sous la lune). Similarly, this season, neither Mila nor Adam, savagely torn from life by the “ideal” nanny chosen to look after them, will ever again listen to a lullaby (Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce).