Art majeur

With La Conférence des objets, written specifically for the Comédie-Française troupe, Christine Montalbetti becomes part of an “age-old tradition”.

Molière tailored the roles he wrote for his companions, and the Comédie-Française troupe – which, up to the Revolution, enjoyed a royal monopoly over French-language performances – was a necessary source of inspiration for authors. Playwrights would therefore write for the Comédie-Française, having to submit to the supreme verdict of the actors or the Reading Committee, and to sometimes accept to make corrections to their works. During rehearsals, this rewriting work continued, with actors demanding modifications or refusing to say certain lines, sometimes even threatening to abandon their roles. For example, the actor Talma frequently collaborated with authors, in particular Ducis, not hesitating to make cuts or even to significantly modify the texts, always out of a concern for the dramaturgy. In the nineteenth century, the actress-stars who performed the tragic repertoire while triumphing in new plays inspired a new generation of writers. Indeed, a whole repertoire was written for Sarah Bernhardt and staged in her own theatre, while other authors sought to write for the great tragedian Rachel.

Productions of this type became rarer during the twentieth century, but came back in favour during the early 1980s. The administrator Jacques Toja corresponded with Bernard-Marie Koltès who confided in him his project to write “a play whose primary dramaturgical characteristic is that it is intended for a Troupe”. But the project never came to fruition.
Opportunities increased during Marcel Bozonnet’s mandate. In 2006, a work by playwright Philippe Minyana was staged, outside the repertoire, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier: La Maison des morts, written for Catherine Hiegel in 1995 – “in the familiarity of her voice” – and directed by Robert Canterella. That same year, Valère Novarina entered the Comédie-Française repertoire with L’Espace furieux, whose first staging dated to 1991 at the Théâtre de la Bastille, based on his novel Je suis. When put to the test of the Salle Richelieu stage, two scenes were rewritten. The resulting changes and adjustments produced “waves that modified the physics and language of the play”, requiring the publication of a new edition. This work on writing continued with Muriel Mayette-Holtz who asked an author, Emmanuel Darley, and a director, Andrés Lima, to place their pens at the service of actors from the Troupe willing to engage in the exercise of improvisation during a ten-day workshop. This collaboration gave rise to the production Bonheur? at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2008.

In 2017, at the request of Éric Ruf, Pascal Rambert wrote and directed Une vie at Le Vieux-Colombier. This work was conceived especially for the voices, bodies and energies of six actors from the Troupe and one child, because “that’s where plays are born. From actors. From that nocturnal dream we have every evening before we drop from tiredness. We fall asleep with these voices. We sleep with these bodies. We rewrite with them in our sleep.”

In 2017-2018, two playwrights were once again invited to write for and with the Troupe, creating productions whose contours were drawn and refined as the rehearsals progressed: David Lescot for Les Ondes magnétiques (Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier) and Lars Norén for Poussière (Salle Richelieu).

This season, Christine Montalbetti wishes there to be “a kind of joyful obviousness” to the Comédie-Française actors embodying the objects she chose for them after meeting and developing individual scores for each one of them.