Directing Crimp and Corneille in France: A Conversation with Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman

French theatre director Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman (fig. 1) is well-known in France and other European countries for her very contemporary combination of the political and the poetic. Since the beginning of her career in the early 1970s as a student of eminent director and theoretician Antoine Vitez, Jaques-Wajeman has staged over forty-five shows in France and abroad, including a number of productions for the premier theatre in France, the Comédie-Française. With her long-time collaborator, theatre scholar and translator François Regnault, she co-directs the Compagnie Pandora, based in Paris; and from 1991 to 1997, she headed the Théâtre de la Commune-Pandora d’Aubervilliers, one of the forty Centres dramatiques nationaux in France. She is best known for her contemporary staging of plays by seventeenth-century French author Pierre Corneille, having produced her tenth and eleventh works by him during the 2013–14 season.

In January 2013, I interviewed Jaques-Wajeman at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, where I had been observing rehearsals for her production of Tendre et cruel (Cruel and Tender), a 2004 work by English playwright Martin Crimp.¹ In my interview, we see her philosophical approach—a self-described “cerebral” one in which the language of the text is the key to every aspect of the production—and the ways that her intellectual and experiential background intersects with the day-to-day exigencies of creating theatre in France. Her intense focus on the written text, with what she views as its inherent markers of desire and power (or lack of it), produces stagings that perform social and societal critique, including analysis of the theatrical process itself. As I observed in this production (and in other shows of hers that I have attended), Jaques-Wajeman’s work is characterized by strong, evocative, and fairly stylized visual and aural presentation. Jaques-Wajeman, who has staged modern and contemporary plays in addition to classical French works, was attracted by Crimp’s play, which is a reflection on post-9/11 society as it plays out in the family, especially in the relationship between a wife and her husband. On a stage that, during most of the production, has a bed as its principal element, we see the Marilyn Monroe-esque main character, Amélia, awaiting the return of her husband, le Général. He has been away fighting terrorism in an unnamed African country. During the course of the show—the action punctuated by recorded phrasings from a jazz trio—le Général’s “exploits” in Africa are shown to have been atrocities, and his status changes from returning hero to broken prisoner of the state. We witness Amélia’s self-revelation and eventual fall as well as she interacts with the secondary characters during the revelation and political “spinning” of the news about her husband: her three personal attendants,² her emotionally distant teenaged son, a young African refugee (who turns out to be her husband’s mistress), a slimy government minister, and an equally slippery journalist (fig. 2). Tendre et cruel takes Sophocles’ play The Women of Trachis as its basis and allows Jaques-Wajeman to explore questions that have interested her throughout her career: the modernity to be found in classical texts; women in society; the complex intersections of the personal and the political that characterize contemporary life; and the way that language transmits, and is inherently part of, these intersections.

Our interview took place in the spacious rehearsal area on the top floor of the imposing Théâtre de la Ville in the center of Paris, on the banks of the Seine. We conversed in French, and I later translated the following portions of our conversation into English.

Fig 1.

Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman.

(Photo: Cosimo Mirco Magliocca.)

Fig 2.

Tendre et cruel, directed by Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman: (l-r) Pascal Bekkar (Jonathan [the minister]), Anne Le Guernec (Amélia), and Bertrand Suarez-Pazos (Richard [the journalist]).

(Photo...