Singulis / Molière-matériau(x) ・ Comédie-Française

“I will call you Jean-Baptiste”: this is how the play opens, like a conversation with a benevolent grandparent. Challenging the truth of biographers’ accounts, the actor offers an intimate portrait of Molière, revealing the impact he left in his life and acting career.

Anecdotes and reflections compose a double portrait, like the confessions of an actor over the centuries. Pierre Louis-Calixte becomes the narrator of his own memory, remembering his first public performance, dressed as Harpagon, in front of laughing classmates, or his entry into the Troupe to play the role of Cléante in Tartuffe, while evoking images of Molière as a child at the theatre with his grandfather, and of Molière being subjected to his first cabals. The stage becomes an intensely vibrant space of memory, a place of exchange with absence. Amidst costumes, books and familiar objects, words seek out those “contact points” that form the basis of our existence. When Jean-Luc Lagarce, who staged Le Malade imaginaire as if to ward off his own fateful illness, enters the stage, our narrator remembers Louis in Juste la fin du monde, a role he performed at the Salle Richelieu in 2008 and which he has carried with him since. “I brought Louis into my life”, he says, recognising how the words of an author or a character work their way through an actor’s body, imbuing it with their presence long after the performance. The sociétaire fully appropriates the motto of the Comédie-Française, “Be together, be oneself” in this one-man show. And it is in this interweaving of his memories, both real and fictional, which inevitably stir up memories of our own, that this tribute to Molière, to the theatre and to life

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