Les héros ne dorment jamais ・ Comédie-Française

“The art of clowning brings me back to the most essential aspects of acting, and to what it means to feel inadequate”, says Edith Proust, who, aside from her work as an actor, has created the character of George the New Clown.

She practices this art in its “grownup” form and enjoys how free and cheeky it allows her to be. For this piece, she drew from the several existing versions of the legend of King Arthur, which has travelled through the ages for 9 centuries, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chrétien de Troyes, up to Wagner’s operas or the Monty Python. The feats of the Knights are as numerous as they are impressive, stuck in an endless cycle of dying and coming back to life. Clowns gaze up at this ideal, hoping humans can finally become virtuous.
The piece is replete with tales of war and courtship, medieval songs and Old French, magic and strange beasts, rendered thanks to a reel-to-reel tape recorder and three clowns, reacting to this audio diary written by authors they never heard of, described by Edith Proust as “a memory trove, a space for the past and for fantasies, a collage of sounds painting the world through the lens of an enchanted space”. A perfect opportunity to wear armours, to share their own take on what an ideal society would look like, to dream of greatness and to summon Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, and Guinevere. These unsleeping heroes are here to hook us with a tale of Holy Grail hunt. These knightly projections hold up a mirror to modern antiheroes – i.e., us – torn between the joys of idleness and the ambition to be seen as superheroes.

NEW PRODUCTION

BOOKING OPENS IN LATE SEPTEMBER 25