Le Crépuscule des singes ・ Comédie-Française

This original play is about a meeting between Molière and Bulgakov three centuries apart.

Louise Vignaud, who has no less than four productions on the go this season, presents a baroque fable about the hypocrisy of power and the immortality of art for her second visit to the Comédie-Française, after Seneca’s Phaedra at the Studio-Théâtre in 2018.

The story takes place in a series of tableaux between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In 1930s Russia, Boileau, Chapelle and La Fontaine are invited to the home of a distraught Bulgakov, who has just seen all his works removed from theatres and libraries. From then on, for the author of The Life of Monsieur de Molière, the cabal against Le Tartuffe and the attacks against L’École des femmes became caught up with his own torments in a game of mirrors. “Make them believe that you have changed your play! Or write something else!”, the French playwright advises the Russian author. From Molière and his troupe backstage at the Petit Bourbon to Bulgakov meeting the director of the Art Theatre, from a telephone conversation with Stalin to an interview with Louis XIV, we follow the two authors to the twilight of their existences.

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth, Louise Vignaud pays tribute, together with Bulgakov, to this ancestor who, until his last breath, and despite the pressure and persistence of his detractors, never gave up on theatre and creation.

Louise Vignaud

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