French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon

6. Great Classics Revisited

Playground for aficionados The variety and quantity of stage performances available on any given day in Paris are staggering. During a typical week of my six-month stay in the City of Light, I was able to choose from 479 events playing at 172 venues.1 Most of these shows took place in fairly conventional theatre spaces, large and small. Yet just as integral to Paris’s theatrical landscape are scores of café-théâtres—niches that offer modest plays, stand-up comedy, or poetry readings while you sip, say, a glass of Brouilly—and dozens of cabaret-dîner-spectacle spots that present such lavish, tourist-oriented entertainments as the nude shows at Le Crazy Horse, drag parodies at Michou, and splashy Las Vegas–style revues at the Moulin Rouge and the Lido, where your (pricey) tickets come with champagne and a four-course meal. If you add to this the circus tents, puppet-show pavilions, and opera houses strewn throughout the city’s neighborhoods and parks (you can take in an opéra bouffe while floating on a barge moored in Paris’s largest canal), even the most jaded culture vulture can turn a bit giddy. Between late December 2005 and the end of June 2006, I attended about ninety French stage events—an average of one show every other day. Conditioned by the bolder segments of ACT FRENCH, I made a point to sample what I suspected would turn out to be unusual and maybe even trailblazing: new playwrights, new experimental companies, new minority voices, nouveau cirque, and so on. But I quickly realized that to gain a full sense of the vibrancy of Paris’s contemporary theatre scene I would also need to delve into an area not at all represented by ACT FRENCH but one that makes the French capital so intensely pleasurable for theatre aficionados of all stripes: the steady revival of works from the past. 6 Great Classics Revisited . . . . . . . . .. 8 Three Prodigious Artists . . . . . . . . . . 9 Cultural Diversity (I) Ethnicities . . . . . . . . . . 11 A Festival Turns Sixty . . . . . . . . . . ​ PA R I S 104 This first chapter on Paris will therefore focus on major new productions of three classic playwrights: Molière, Paul Claudel, and Edmond Rostand. It will also give pride of place to the ComédieFran çaise—the great state-supported company founded by Louis XIV and whose acting traditions owe a huge debt to Molière himself. In recent years the Comédie-Française—often referred to as the Théâtre Français or simply the Français—has sought to modernize both its repertory and its productions. It has also increasingly drawn on international theatre artists.Yet the Français has no monopoly on reviving the classics. Some of the most interesting new versions of Molière, for instance, often take place in less exalted spaces and sometimes far beyond Paris. “Public” versus “private” theatre A fairly strict cultural split exists among Parisian theatregoers . In one camp are those who frequent France’s state- and citysupported not-for-profit theatres, known as the théâtre public. In the other are those who prefer the théâtre privé, the approximately fifty major commercial houses that showcase celebrity players and offer fairly conventional dramatic fare—especially new comedies and plotand character-driven dramas. It is a division in taste that roughly corresponds , in New York terms, to folks who, on one hand, are strongly drawn to the offbeat and frequently more challenging shows of Offand Off-Off-Broadway; and, on the other, those who revel in the more familiar and typically less demanding plays and musicals that run at midtown Broadway houses. ‘Art’ versus ‘entertainment’ is convenient shorthand for distinguishing between the théâtre public and the théâtre privé. Within my own circle of Parisian friends I found that—unlike many of their more flexible New York counterparts—very few are inclined to cross the line between the one and the other. I, however, have always enjoyed both the artsy and the “merely” entertaining. So I was determined to do the unthinkable: move freely amid both sectors. After all, boulevard dramas and comedies—named as such because most commercial theatres are found along the grands boulevards on Paris’s Right Bank—can, at their best, offer intense, even transcendent pleasure . And government-funded projects, for all their artistic pretensions , are sometimes absolute duds. Great​Classics​Revisited 105 A national network of theatres For...