La Fleur à la bouche

One missed his train and is waiting until dawn, having left his parcels in the left-luggage office. The other knows he is condemned to death by an incurable disease, “flower in the mouth”, leaving him only a few months to live. During this brief respite, he clings desperately to life, scrupulously observing the world around him. He scrutinises reality in its every detail, pursuing moments of life, but may already be detached from humanity itself. This one-act play by Pirandello, a questioning of life and death, responds to Lampedusa’s character of the Leopard who witnesses the slow and steady decline of his caste as he gradually becomes a spectator of his own existence. The production interweaves the two works, exalting the deeply Sicilian character of their authors, marked by the weight of religion and the sense of the tragic...

Luigi Pirandello, the author
Originally from Agrigento in Sicily, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was first a novelist and short story writer; it wasn’t until later on that he turned to playwrighting, earning international recognition with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. He wrote The Man with the Flower in His Mouth in 1923. His work is marked by recurring themes, such as the figure of the double or “the play within the play”, especially in Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921).He shares with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), the author of the novel The Leopard, published after his death in 1958, a lucid understanding that their native island was experiencing the end of an era.Louis Arene, the director
Louis Arene entered the Comédie-Française in 2012. After training at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris and further training in improvisation and masks, he performed under the direction of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, Dominique Catton and Christiane Suter, Mélodie Berenfeld, Annabelle Simon, Mario Gonzalez and Philippe Calvario. In 2011, he created the solo La Dernière Berceuse (The Last Lullaby) which won several awards. In 2012, he founded the Théâtre des Ailes with Lionel Lingelser. At the Comédie-Française, he has acted in the productions of Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Jean-Yves Ruf and Sulayman Al-Bassam. Here, for his directorial debut, he is staging a text that elicits a particular poetry from reality, in itself a metaphor for the art of the actor. Louis Arene also sees this production, designed by the sociétaire Michel Favory, as way of fostering exchange within the company, between two generations of actors from very different worlds.

Accompagné d'extraits du Guépard de Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
Sur une proposition de Michel Favory
Mise en scène de Louis Arene