Les Oubliés. Alger-Paris

THEATRE SOMETIMES speaks to us of the world by seizing upon pivotal moments in history, more frequently to describe social and cultural realities rather than political events. Cultural references in Comédie-Française productions may relate to everyday situations, such as the controlling influence of religion experienced by the characters of a Molière play, or to pleasurable subjects, such as the recent re-imaginings of artistic and musical encounters (Trois hommes dans un salon, Comme une pierre qui...). These references remain enduring, never going out of date. In the tradition of Aeschylus’ The Persians (472 BC) and Jean Racine’s Bajazet (1672), both of which were written in reaction to contemporary events, current affairs sometimes inspire playwrights in the spur of the moment, as illustrated by Cartouche ou Les Voleurs (Legrand, 1721) whose writing and performance coincided with the trial of the famous outlaw Cartouche, or L’Anglais à Bordeaux, which Favart was commissioned to write following the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years’ War, to celebrate Franco-English reconciliation. In Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy’s Tippo-Saëb (1813) one also finds a reference to the Indian prince who formed an alliance with Louis XVI against the English. However, in historical theatre, such subjects are usually described at some distance as censorship or contingencies can prevent an immediate and contemporary depiction of the facts. During the French Revolution, the ten or so plays dealing with current political events performed at the Comédie-Française were less popular with audiences than ancient tragedies and historical plays. And following the Troupe’s return to the Salle Richelieu (1799), it remained a delicate matter to evoke the events of the Revolution until the 1830s,... Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat was staged in Régnier-Destourbet’s version in 1831 and Ponsard’s in 1850.

While twentieth-century authors wrote more readily about contemporary political events, the time gap before their plays were staged at the Comédie-Française sometimes altered this contemporaneity somewhat. This gap seems to reduce to less than half a century when conflicts from other continents are imported onto the stage: the Korean War in 1950 (Michel Vinaver’s Les Coréens, 1993), relations between Afghanistan and the West described shortly before 11 September 2001 (Tony Kushner’s Homebody / Kabul, 2003), the fate of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Suzanne Lebeau’s Le Bruit des os qui craquent, 2010). There are fewer and fewer spectators to have actually experienced the events described by playwrights who were contemporaries of the First World War, such as Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind, 2016), or of Nazism, such as Bertolt Brecht (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 2017). As for the still sensitive wounds of the Algerian war, they have only been evoked on the stages of the Comédie-Française since 2003, with the adaptation of Kateb Yacine’s novel Nedjma and Bernard-Marie Koltès’ play Le Retour au désert (2007).

Since 2015, the “Journées particulières” cycle at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier has provided a framework to rediscover forgotten plays from the Repertoire by placing them in their historical, political and social context. Drawing on chronicles from the period and archival documents, an account of the real-life events depicted in the plays is intertwined with the theatrical fiction to shed light on it and explain it to a contemporary audience.