Le Cerf et le Chien

Beasts of all kinds have, by the mere fact of being evoked, invaded the stage since Antiquity. At the Comédie-Française, when an animal, most often a wild animal or a bird, made the headlines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was to illustrate, metaphorically, the character of the protagonists, such as in Henry Bataille’sMaman colibri. And if the author makes an animal character speak, artifice must give the illusion of animality, from naturalistic costume (La Forêt mouillée, 1930) to aesthetic mask (Les Fables de La Fontaine, 2004).

From the twentieth century onwards, animal life was more present on stage in the flesh-and-blood variety. For the sake of greater realism, many animals, whether domesticated or not, have played ancillary roles, appearing on stage or even fluttering up into the fly tower: dogs, horses, ducks, butterflies, pigeons, canaries and so on.

Animals on stage or natural-born performers, the animal and the actor make the audience think about their own animality and humanity.

The porosity between animality and humanity can be made more permeable by the director who may exploit its playful potential, for example transposing the ideal city of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (The Birds, 2009) to the Place Colette, in front of the Comédie-Française (Cuckoo-on-Stage) where the “actirds” roost. Similarly, the stage goes animal when the actor transforms into a boar through theatrical illusion alone (Mystère bouffe et fabulage, 2010). In terms of costume, the animality of the character is sometimes non-existent or reduced to the strict minimum for eternally identifiable characters, for example in a corkscrew tail (The Three Little Pigs, 2012), a hand covered with fur, or antlers and fur-trimmed coat (Marcel Aymé’s Le Loup, Le Cerf et le chien, 2009 and 2016), the actor’s movements completing the metamorphosis.