ReportageThe “Frenchman” is getting ready to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Molière’s baptism. No less than nine plays by the playwright will be performed until next summer. Unpublished sets, bespoke costumes, paintings and furniture… In Paris and Sarcelles, almost 200 artisans and technicians are busy before the red curtain rises.
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Val-d’Oise, ZAC of Sarcelles. A bit of the suburbs that looks like so many others with its factories and shops that look like depots. Under a fine autumn rain, two blue trucks cross the portal of the workshops of the sets of the Comédie-Française. Created in 1974, three warehouses stretch there over some 20,000 square meters, between a glass factory, an automobile parts manufacturer and a fabric store. Clouds with childish lines are drawn on the upper part of its hangars. Inside, about thirty workers are bustling about. They are locksmiths, carpenters, upholsterers, painters, sculptors, decorators. For several weeks, everyone has been focused on the sets for the next Tartuffe or the Hypocrite.
In their vast workshop, three members of the brigade of locksmith builders weld the steel rods which, when assembled, must constitute a long walkway. “Me, to be honest, I go to the theater more for the scenery than for the actors, says Sébastien Torquet, a CAP in boilermaking and thirteen years in the house on the clock. Before, we made pieces of scenery, but we never saw the final result. The set was assembled in Paris. Now we put everything together here in the pre-assembly room and like that, we realize what it feels like. And that’s a real pride. »
During the cigarette break, Gaël Schiavon, in his twenties, trained on the job in metal and aluminum, evokes with a great burst of laughter the last time he went to see a play at the Comédie-Française: “It was maybe three years ago, it was called Spring Awakening [de Frank Wedekind]. I didn’t like it at all! It was about a teenager who discovers sexuality, and I didn’t understand anything! » Installed in front of the small annex forge, Dorian Michaux, youngest of the brigade, admits having never entered the legendary Richelieu room: “I’m waiting for the right setting to discover it… It might be this Tartuffe that we are about to finish! »
About twenty different professions
On January 15, the Comédie-Française will celebrate the 400e anniversary of Molière’s baptism (his date of birth remains unknown). On this occasion, the Belgian star Ivo van Hove was chosen for the very first staging of the version censored by Louis XIV of the Tartuffe or the Hypocrite, play in three acts dating from 1664, recently restored by the historian Georges Forestier. Like this work whose original, The Tartuffe or the Imposter, has been performed here 3,193 times since 1680, the challenge remains: how to perpetuate and reinvent this author of the XVIIe century whose plays every kid in France has studied? At the beginning of the year, a Chekhov, a Bergman and a Lagarce are programmed, but then, until July, the Comédie-Française will only play Molière with nine creations and four covers offered on its three stages (Salle Richelieu, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier and Studio-Théâtre).
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