Les Précieuses ridicules ・ Comédie-Française

“As for me, I maintain that outside Paris there is no salvation for honest people.”

This is the credo of Cathos and Magdelon, the anti-heroines of Les Précieuses ridicules. These two young women wish at all costs to exist in the eyes of a milieu that does not recognise or know them and they do so by using manners that no one understands. They fall into the trap set by two suitors they have humiliated, ending up unknowingly exposed, a situation from which the play draws all its comic strength, but also its most topical questions.

More than 350 years after this comedy was written, Sébastien Pouderoux and Stéphane Varupenne, who presented Les Serge (Gainsbourg point barre) in 2019 at the Studio-Théâtre, do not seek to criticise a form of hypocrisy prevalent in the seventeenth century, but to question how far one can go to be or feel loved. What is the process by which one loses one’s discernment? They also emphasise the strength of the denouement of the Précieuses ridicules, which not only “uncovers a deception, but also reflects a disillusionment and a broken dream.”

The story takes place in a single space, the affected young ladies’ salon, presented in a traverse staging in which baroque furniture cohabits with a few abstract installations and musical instruments, expressing the characters’ clumsy desire to inhabit the place to be.

Stéphane Varupenne
Sébastien Pouderoux

Comedy in 1 act

Work first performed: 18 November 1659 at the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon
Comédie-Française premiere: 1 October 1680 at the Théâtre de l’Hôtel Guénégaud
1,508 performances of the work by the Comédie-Française since the premiere.

New production