Contre ・ Comédie-Française

Contre

by Constance Meyer, Agathe Peyrard et Sébastien Pouderoux
based on the life and work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
directed by Constance Meyer et Sébastien Pouderoux

Petit Saint-Martin

29 January 8 March 2026

"Contre" revolves around a famous couple, that of artists John Cassavetes, an outcast, truth-obsessed yet untrustworthy filmmaker, a mix between Don Quixote and The Misanthrope, and dazzling performer Gena Rowlands, the inventor of a new type of female characters.

The play revolves around the making of A Woman Under Influence, complete with its gang of actors, staff, and producers, and is set in a short period ranging from the movie’s feverish preparation to its tumultuous filming. The play also questions the world of film critics and the relationship between an avant-garde piece and the audience seeing it for the first time. Journalist Pauline Kael is a key lever of the play: Cassavetes’ antagonist wrote with radical subjectivity, which turned her into a pioneer film critic. A series of testimonies are displayed in a police station after the chief operator of Shadows pressed charges against Cassavetes for battery. While the pressing of charges is a fictitious event, this sequence is fuelled by the endless string of conflicts aroused by Cassavetes from his directing debuts until the end of his life. The piece is made up of three main plots designed to depict a certain time and place: Contre is about people gnawingly, forcefully trying to make art, about questioning the status of artists within societies, the virtues and limits of irreverence, and the gap which sometimes separates what we say, what we want and what we do.

This show premiered on September 25, 2024 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier

BOOKING OPENS IN LATE SEPTEMBER 25