Les Damnés

FROM HIS APPOINTMENT as Administrator of the Comédie-Française in 1970, Pierre Dux invited Jean Vilar, who in turn asked him to bring the Comédie-Française to the Avignon Festival. However, Pierre Dux feared that with overly traditional plays, he would be exposing the Comédiens-Français to a public reputed for its rowdiness. Budget difficulties put an end to any hope of a collaboration. When Jean Vilar died, his successor, Paul Puaux, again offered the Festival’s Cour d’honneur to the Comédie-Française for the 1972 edition. Jean-Paul Roussillon proposed to stage Sophocles (Oedipus king and Oedipus at Colonus). Along with the other play sent by Pierre Dux, Richard III directed by Terry Hands, these productions left the press indifferent, if not to say sceptical regarding the Comédie-Française’s ability to “move with the times in the Cour d’honneur”.

The invitation was not renewed until 1979, when Bernard Faivre d’Acier, Puaux’s successor, convinced the new Administrator Jacques Toja to participate in the festival with a production that prefigured a stronger involvement in 1981. La Double Inconstance, an existing Jean-Luc Boutté production, was selected for this late addition to the programme. The former Carmelite cloister (Cloître des Carmes) offered an ideal setting for the Maison de Molière. The casting of roles against type, the quality of the performance and the bare staging caught the critics by surprise: “The Comédie-Française turtle continues to outdistance many avant-garde hares.”

As planned, in 1981 it took over the Cour d’honneur: Euripides’ Medea directed by Jean Gillibert, accompanied by readings at the Cloître du Palais Vieux, opened the Festival. The staging, caustic but divisive, generated a great deal of debate.

Bernard Sobel, approached about directing Coriolan in 1981, represented the Comédie-Française with Schiller’s Mary Stuart in the Cloître of Villeneuve lès Avignon in 1983.

For Bernard Faivre d’Acier, this Festival is “for men and women in their thirties who have now reached full maturity”. One such person, Jean-Pierre Vincent, at the time director of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg (TNS) and who opened the Festival with Bernard Chartreux’s Dernières nouvelles de la peste, learned when in Avignon that he had been appointed to the head of the Comédie-Française.

This son of the Festival was to bring the Comédie-Française’s production of Macbeth to Avignon in 1985. Unfortunately the mistral interrupted performances for several days.

From 1985, a writer was honoured by the Festival every year. As a result of the collaboration between Alain Crombecque, Festival director since 1984, who wanted to give a voice to contemporary authors, and Jean-Pierre Vincent, who, during his tenure, revived the tradition of literary evenings, Le Savon by Francis Ponge –in its first ever staging– was, for the Comédie-Française, “another way of imagining production”. The literary adventure continued two years later with Robert Pinget (1987), to whom Alain Crombecque paid tribute during the forty-first Festival, marked by the “presence in force of institutions”: the Théâtre de Chaillot, the Paris Opera, the Théâtre des Amandiers and the Comédie-Française.

Among the directors most faithful to the Avignon Festival and most inextricably linked to its history were several Comédie-Française Administrators: Jean-Pierre Vincent, Antoine Vitez and Jacques Lassalle. In 1989, when he came to the Cour d’honneur for the third time, Vitez had been at the head of the Comédie-Française for a year. He opened the Festival with Jeanne Moreau, who had not performed there since 1951, in Fernando de Rojas’ La Célestine and the Troupe continued to participate in readings, this time of texts by Aimé Césaire.

Vitez died in 1990. “A collaboration spanning several years had been planned with the Comédie-Française” stressed Alain Crombecque in his tribute. The Institution returned to Avignon in 1992 for a series of readings by Serge Rezvani, and subsequently in 1993 with Dom Juan, “the production that set the template for many others to come” (Bernard Faivre d’Acier, who had been reappointed as Festival director), which hadn’t been performed for thirty-five years. Bad luck struck. The rain falling on the raked stage made the set –designed to beautifully match the architectural setting– impracticable for the actors. Performances had to be cancelled.

Since 2004, when the associated artists started participating in the Festival programming, the Comédie-Française has struggled to make itself appealing and to find its place. The Maison Jean-Vilar nonetheless provides it with an exceptional space for readings. While the opening of the Avignon Festival in 2016 by the Comédie-Française is therefore no novelty for an institution that has regularly featured there (eleven productions in twenty-one years), it still constituted an event when, after a 23-year absence, it returned to the Cour d’honneur to premiere Les Damnés directed by Ivo van Hove.