La Dame de la mer ・ Comédie-Française

After directing "The Little Mermaid" in 2018 at the Studio-Théâtre, Géraldine Martineau, who has since become a "pensionnaire" of the Troupe, turns her attention to another journey of female emancipation with Ibsen’s "The Lady from the Sea".

Never performed at the Comédie-Française, this play by the Norwegian playwright, a precursor of modern theatre, offers a world at once stuck in the doldrums of the everyday and transcended by supernatural phenomena – under the influence of fantasies that have become phobias.
Ellida lives with her older husband, a doctor, and the two daughters he had from a first marriage, in a house with no views, whose stifling calm she escapes by going to the sea every day. The atmosphere is joyous as the play opens with preparations for a party where the arrival of two guests promises to brighten up the girls’ walks. Ellida, who is haunted by the vision of a sailor to whom she had vowed her eternal love, is forced to make a crucial choice when this stranger returns from his travels to ask her to be faithful to her youthful passion and follow him.
Harnessing this sense of “secret nostalgia”, Géraldine Martineau engages with the rich layers of Ibsen’s characters and sets the scene of their listless lives at a time when certainties fissure and dreams drift away. Faced with this reconstituted family, under the weight of taboos imposed by a good-natured patriarchal authority, she imagines an organic scenography that is all shimmer. From the call of the sea to the forest of our unconscious, the liberating power of the imagination sets in motion the eternal struggle between determinism and free will.

with the generous support of Aline Foriel-Destezet, great ambassador of artistic creation

NEW PRODUCTION

Version scénique d’après la traduction de Maurice Prozor

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