La Petite Sirène ・ Comédie-Française

“Tomorrow at last.” Full of curiosity and dreams, the Little Mermaid yearns for her fifteenth birthday. Like her sisters before her, in keeping with tradition, she will be allowed to leave her palace at the bottom of the sea and discover the beauties of the earthly world that she has been told so much about. That next day a storm rages and she finds herself witnessing the drowning of a young man. She takes him back to shore and her song brings him back to life, prompting her to disappear immediately...

So begin the adventures of the “little plankton” – as her grandmother nicknames her – who falls in love with a stranger and is daring enough to accept the pact offered to her by the sea witch: beautiful agile legs in exchange for her voice, but never to see her own kind again and, if the prince should marry another, she will turn into foam.

Géraldine Martineau adapts Andersen’s tale into blank verse set to the alexandrine meter, and imagines a musical forest of coral. The journey of emancipation undertaken by the mermaid, whose dancing enchants humans and who experiences the first stirrings of love, the fear of adults and the violence of the world, is an ode to difference. It asks us to think about what parts of ourselves we are capable of transforming to please others. Géraldine Martineau emphasises the poetic aspect of the story over the punitive moral of the tale. She tells us that by becoming the Daughter of the Air, the mermaid acquires “a nature full of natural goodness, perhaps closer to her own, and can thus continue her discovery of the world and the elements.”

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