Dom Juan by Molière, at the Théâtre National de Nice
Friday 11th October 2024
Published on Resonances Lyriques Org
‘My good sir / Learn that every flatterer / Lives at the expense of the listener. This lesson is certainly worth an insult’. Here, the fox from Jean de la Fontaine's famous fable takes on the guise of his prey: the crow. Dressed all in black, Dom Juan, admirably played by Xavier Gallais, is dressed in the charismatic plumage of the necrophagous bird, stuffed and displayed in the middle of the stage. With his body veiled in black, he strolls through the space with virtuosity.
‘Clothes don't make the man’, as our beloved French proverb proclaims to the consciences of innocent souls! After directing an equally diabolical Tartuffe, camouflaged in his obscure cassock to better abuse the credulity of men and women alike, Macha Makeïeff recognised in the two actors she was directing the two protagonists of her next play: Xavier Gallais[1] as Dom Juan and Vincent Winterhalter as his faithful servant, Sganarelle.
Armed with this intuition, she ‘throws her pig’ on stage, instilling an invisible but very real link with the Marquis de Sade's jouissance à faire le mal. Here Dom Juan is no longer the charismatic seducer the world loved to identify with, but a perverse manipulator, a veritable contemporary psychopath wielding his power under everyone's nose. The resounding story of Abbé Pierre is a pitiful illustration of the topicality of this point.
A dark play, so dark in the light of Molière's words that it needs exceptional stage comedy to spread this warning message. Comedy? That goes without saying! The stagecraft in this ‘drama-comedy’ is bursting with excellence and mischief, inventiveness and fantasy worthy of the theatre of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin: door games, mimes (Sganarelle's duel is admirable!), theatre within the theatre, choreography... the audience frolics in a veritable fountain of youth brimming with mischief and trickery. ‘There's no such thing as great laughter unless it's on the edge of the abyss,’ says Macha Makeïeff in an interview on France Culture[2].
In an absolutely ambient aesthetic, chosen for this effect in the 18th century, a time of luxuriance and refinement, of the enjoyment of fabrics and libertinism, of music and the Enlightenment, the predatory hero, no longer a seducer, zealously captures his prey cloistered in the arena of his home, to the sound of the harpsichord played by an opera singer with ample spherical pigtails.
Accompanied by Sganarelle, played by the highly talented Vincent Winterhalter, dressed in dazzling white in contrast to his master, Molière's language is used on stage to express the themes of love that blinds; the hypocrisy that nestles in the religious profession to hide from suspicion under the credulous respect of its lost sheep; the damaged relationship between a father and his son; the power of money over love; corrupt medicine...
Macha Makeïeff adds the resurrection of women, with all the finesse of her direction. Like black, which contains all the colours of art, the darkness of the subject is played out in a subtle variation, rich in sparkle and nuance, making this play a veritable monument!
[1] Twenty-two years after performing his first Cyrano with Loïc Corbery and Marina Hands under the direction of Jacques Weber, Xavier Gallais returns to the TNN.
[2] Macha Makeïeff, director: ‘Dom Juan is an impeded character’, France Culture
Nathalie AUDIN
11 October 2024
Direction, sets and costumes : Macha Makeïeff
Distribution :
Joaquim Fossi
Xavier Gallais
Khadija Kouyaté
Xaverine Lefebvre
Anthony Moudir
Irina Solano
Pascal Ternisien
Vincent Winterhalter
Jeanne-Marie Lévy [mezzo-soprano]
Nice Côte d'Azur National Dramatic Centre
Directrice : Muriel Mayette‑Holtz
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