La Nuit des rois (Twelfth Night) by La Comédie Française (review)

I went to see Thomas Ostermeier's production of La Nuit des roisat La Comédie Française on Saint Valentine's Day in 2019. Yet for all its love-driven twists and turns the comedy felt weirdly un-romantic in the biting cold of this French winter of discontent. Only weeks before, the Richelieu Hall where the performance was held had to close down and cancel all events for fear of destruction and violence following a massive demonstration of the "yellow vests" movement, during which hundreds of thousands of protestors throughout the country had gathered each and every Saturday since November. Paris, and France at large, was then right in the middle of one of the most brutal waves of protests and repression of the century.

One month before, in January 2019, Thomas Ostermeier had presented his adaptation of Retour à Reimsby Didier Éribon at the Théâtre de la Ville (Espace Cardin), whose main entrance was guarded by heavily armed police forces in anticipation of potential disruptions. Éribon's famous autobiography-cum-sociological-essay, published in 2009, probes into the many failures of the left over the last decades in Western societies. Ostermeier's simple staging consisted in imagining an actress recording a voice-over for a cinematographic version of the book. Behind her, on the screen in the recording studio, footage of demonstrations and riots, including "yellow vests" protests, provided images for the fictional documentary.

Nothing in the scenography of La Nuit des roiswas in any way so visibly or explicitly related to current events. Nina Wetzel, the costume and set designer for the comedy, explained to me over the phone, while we were both confined in our homes due to the COVID-19 crisis, that she had wanted her Illyria to remain deliberately impossible to locate. The stage was covered in sand and left almost bare, save for a couple of cardboard palm trees and equally artificial rocks, a loudspeaker, a massive armchair covered in a leopard skin, and two actors fully costumed as bonobos playing under the bright light coming from a huge star-shaped chandelier hanging high above.

Yet it seemed to me that Ostermeier's Nuit des roiskept taking the audience back to Paris, February 2019, and was raising political and social issues that were not all that remote from those which he more overtly tackled in his Retour à Reims. This was made most obvious in the intermission of sorts that was added to Oliver Cadiot's translation of the play. It came under the form of an improvised scene happening at the end of act two: Sir Andrew Gueule de Fièvre (Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Christophe Montenez) and Sir Toby Haut LeCœur (Sir Toby Belch, Laurent Stocker), speaking in tall microphones from the very front of the stage, embarked upon a short and hilarious stand-up number which changed every night. The night I saw the play the two actors joked about a recent video showing French President Emmanuel Macron explaining to an unemployed man that finding work was easy and that he only needed to "cross the road" to find a job. They then briefly made further comments about "l'affaire Benalla," a scandal involving Macron's former aide and bodyguard Alexandre Benalla who, it had just been revealed, had impersonated a police...