Le Misanthrope ・ Comédie-Française

Clément Hervieu-Léger explores the temperament of the “cantankerous lover”. The work shows us a society free of parental and religious influence whose social veneer is stripped away when desire surfaces.

For Molière, 1665 –the year when The Misanthrope was written– was a year of betrayal: that of Racine, who gave his tragedy Alexander the Great to the troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, after the failure of its first production by Molière’s troupe at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Can one detect autobiographical resonances in Alceste’s black humour, who, to hate one person, decides to hate the whole world? Clément Hervieu-Léger, Sociétaire at the Comédie-Française, explores the temperament of the “cantankerous lover”, his struggle against the weariness of self and loneliness. The work shows us a society free of parental and religious influence whose social veneer is stripped away when desire surfaces.
Pushed to their limit by the radicality of an Alceste willing to give up any form of sociability, over the course of a day, the characters reveal the contradictions of a humanity that obeys its heart over reason. They form a social microcosm that is placed in an open space, outside a mansion that is being renovated, instead of in the cosy setting of a salon. The set is a moving space, a metaphor for the Repertoire, which, according to the director, should be: “evolving, completely of its century but nourished by previous centuries and already turning to the coming century. I belong to a repertory theatre, and I think that if we do not approach the works from a fresh perspective, then this repertory theatre has no reason to exist.”

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