Le Côté de Guermantes

Many playwrights have drawn inspiration from existing works, most frequently dramatic ones. They more rarely work from novels as this is an exercise that raises multiple literary questions – how does one transpose the narrative qualities specific to a genre? – or staging-related questions – how does one make the multiplicity of places in a novel exist on a theatre stage? From appropriation to faithful transposition, theatrical adaptations of novels hold up a mirror to literary history.

In both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of foreign novelists were plundered by playwrights. The edifying best-selling novels of the Englishman Samuel Richardson, for example, were transposed to the stage under the names of other authors.
The phenomenon took on a new dimension in the nineteenth century, when the Romantic novelists recycled their own literary successes and gave them a second life on stage. Alexandre Dumas became a specialist of this practice, but the Comédie-Française, a repertory theatre, was more interested in original dramatic texts than in adaptations, even when by the author. At the time theatre was more profitable than bookshop sales, which incited some novelists to pursue this opportunity – such as Balzac, the eternal debtor.

From the twentieth century onwards, adaptations of novels were more frequent, whether by the authors themselves or by other writers. In the same way that the dramatic works of foreign authors were entering the Repertoire in translation, the great novelistic repertoire began to find a place in the Salle Richelieu, mainly after the Second World War, as part of a practice of performing epic works that constituted a universally recognised world literary heritage. Indeed, one could speak of a genuine fashion, which was taken up by all theatres at the time. The most frequently adapted authors were Dostoevsky, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dickens and Zweig. At the Comédie-Française, productions of note include: Les Misérables adapted by Paul Achard (1957), Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1963) and The Idiot (performed in 1975 at the Théâtre Marigny), adapted by Gabriel Arout, or The Eternal Husband by the same author again, adapted by Victor Haïm (performed in 1987 at the Odéon).
Some plays were based on several layers of writing, such as the Life of the Great Don Quixote and the Fat Sacho Panza by Antonio José da Silva, which proposed a baroque rewrite of Cervantes’ myth (performed in 2008 at the Salle Richelieu), or Antonin Artaud’s Les Cenci (staged at the Odéon in 1981), which is inspired both by a Percy Shelley play (1819) and a short story by Stendhal (1837), both in turn inspired by Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Italian Chronicles (1749).
More recently, directors have chosen to do their own adaptations of the novels they stage, with a view to ensuring complete homogeneity and coherence between the work on the text and the work they do on stage. Goncharov’s Oblomov was adapted and directed by Volodia Serre in 2013. For Fanny and Alexandre, Julie Deliquet (2019) used the novel, scenario and series created by Bergman to propose a devised approach that was finalised in rehearsals.

While it must be said that the novels adapted to the stage are most often chosen for their eventful plots, Christophe Honoré’s project to adapt a Marcel Proust novel is all the more original as this work is all about introspection.