La Règle du jeu

Tradition, classicism and a text-based theatre founded on scrupulous respect for authors are the prisms through which the Comédie-Française is often judged. In light of its long history, or its value as an example abroad and for young audiences, there is a tendency to see it standing outside the current trend in which theatre production is moving towards a practice of stage writing. Yet, a perusal of the institution’s archives shows us the opposite to be true. The paradox is that the Comédie-Française is, for the external gaze, caught between the canonisation of the repertoire, which seems to symbolically freeze texts in the version in which they enter this national literary repository, and the reality of the day-to-day work on texts that have always been considered as material for performance, a work in progress that is never completed and that not even the performance definitively establishes. The admission of a film script into the Repertoire perfectly illustrates this perspective.

Literary rewriting, modification of plays according to a specific political context, stage writing... over time, practices have changed but the theatrical text has always, by nature, remained a malleable material.

Whatever the era, the practice of intervening in the text has been systematic: there is not a single working copy preserved in the library-museum of the Comédie-Française that is not annotated, that does not bear evidence of slight or substantial cuts. While rewritings can be literary or contextual, the rehearsal process also induces frequent modifications to the text, depending on the play, the dramaturgy and the staging. Prompters’ manuscripts and actors’ copies of plays bear witness to the work done on the stage, usually in agreement with the author who attends the rehearsal whenever possible. This was the case until the first third of the twentieth century. These manuscripts are very often annotated: a word is replaced with another that works better during the reading, the structure of a sentence is modified, and so on.

This long history of theatrical material, text or stage writing, serving a profoundly living art, demonstrates how the Repertoire is not frozen in fixed forms and supports Éric Ruf’s statement: the Comédie-Française is “a theatre that does not have an obligation to choose one territory but the duty to explore them all”.