Haute surveillance

Similarly to great men, famous criminals occupy a prominent place in romantic and theatrical fictions. For Diderot, the staging of crime brings us back to the originalpower of the Greek theatre. When depicted on stage, the brutality of Nero, Macbethand company,asbrought to life by Shakespeare and the French tragedians,explodes before the eyes of the audience. The manner in which it has been handled aesthetically hasvaried over the centuries, consisting primarily in blurring the original violence while preserving its essence.

From the nineteenth century onwards, classical tragedy became grounded in everyday life, bringing to the stage criminals who were close to their contemporaries. Newspaper stories became a source of inspiration for the theatre industry, in particular in the theatres of the so-called Boulevard of crime and on the stage of the Grand Guignol. At the Comédie-Française, despite antecedents such as Marc-Antoine Legrand’s depiction of the famous brigand Cartouche in Cartouche ou Les Voleurs (1721), petty criminals did not come to the fore until the 1980s, drawn out of the shadows by Brecht, Genet, Koltès, Bond, etc. The author of Les Bonnes(The Maids) who transfigured the sisters Papin,confined the audience’s view to a cell shared by three prisonersin Haute Surveillance (Deathwatch).

Confinement is not a new theme in the Repertoire, going back as far as Les Victimes cloîtrées (Monvel, 1791). The troupe has tackled it more recently in Sartre (Huis clos, Les Séquestrés d’Altona), demonstrating how it exacerbates violence, a violence that Genet subversive lyrenders common place.