Le Côté de Guermantes ・ Comédie-Française

In September 2020, Christophe Honoré brought to the stage the third volume of the seven that make up "À la recherche du temps perdu", which Proust began writing in 1913.

Thus, his first collaboration with the Comédie-Française finally made it to the boards after the pandemic that had delayed its premiere and after he had made the film Guermantes while the production was in limbo.
Christophe Honoré is aware of how literature resists attempts at illustrative adaptations, but also how it comes to life when it is deployed in the present time: “I am not offering an adaptation but a séance, for I consider that the theatre is a place where one can seriously connect with the dead. Invoking and evoking is not about adapting, it is about reading with several others, deciphering, knowing oneself as a living person who knows nothing among the learned dead. It is about crossing the bridge and believing that ghosts will come to meet us.”
Thus, on the landing of a large Haussmann hall where two entrances face each other, he returns to that moment in the Recherche when Marcel, the Narrator, moves with his family to Paris, into an apartment in the Hôtel de Guermantes, whose salon he dreams of frequenting. In Combray, he had already admired the portrait of the Duchess Oriane, a figure he is fascinated with. Portraying a farewell to childhood and the discovery of amorous illusions, this book is also a rare account of the bonds of friendship forged between the Narrator and the Dreyfus supporter Saint-Loup.
In his staging, Christophe Honoré gives us the sensation that we are discovering something “absolutely familiar” to our lives, that same insistent, unsettling sensation experienced by the reader, and which Honoré makes into the vanishing point of his theatrical project.

Premiere
30 September 2020
at the Théâtre Marigny

TICKETS GO ON SALE
23 JAN

Creative team

Devised and staged by: Christophe Honoré
Scenography: Alban Ho Van et Ariane Bromberger
Costumes: Pascaline Chavanne
Lights: Dominique Bruguière
Sound: Pierre Routin
Choregraphy: Marlène Saldana
Makeup: Vesna Peborde
Stage assistant: Aurélien Gschwind et Sébastien Lévy
Costumes assistant: Claire Fayel
Lights assitants: Nicolas Faucheux et Pierre Gaillardot

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