Finish in style. To end his mandate as administrator, Éric Ruf brings together the Frenchman’s troupe and turns Paul Claudel’s “Soulier de satin” into a theater festival that celebrates dramatic art where the impossible is forever forbidden.
A bare space for a quiet time. Here is brushed in broad strokes The Satin Shoe by Claudel proposed by Éric Ruf in a majestic farewell to his ten years as administrator of the Comédie-Française. With him, the troupe was enriched, renewed, diversified and brought together incandescent talents. It is to one of the last actors hired, Baptiste Chabauty, that falls the role of Don Rodrigue, the autofictional character of Paul Claudel, dashing conquistador at 3 p.m. when the show starts, old man amputated and sold as a slave, at 11:30 p.m. at the end of the performance.
Among the many reasons which motivated Éric Ruf’s choice to produce this extraordinary piece, we will remember one which associates poetic excess with the reminder of a gesture of political resistance. It is here, within the walls of the Comédie-Française, that The Satin Shoedirected by Jean-Louis Barrault, in 1943, in the midst of the Occupation. This is where Antoine Vitez wanted to take it again, when he was appointed administrator, after having created it at the Avignon festival in 1987. He did not have the time. Since then, only Olivier Py has ventured in 2003 and 2009 to produce the full version of the play.
An ambitious epic
The drastic cuts made in the cultural budget are not favorable to these large extravagant forms which fit the world on a platter? “As the Comédie-Française is going through budgetary troubles, the reflex would be to reduce artistic ambition; on the contrary, I think that it is necessary, in these cases, to expand it further.”, retorts Éric Ruf.
However, in this specific case, the substance meets the form. After wandering around the immense bare stage of the Richelieu Hall, the actors slip through the middle of the audience, the orchestra, along a footbridge which spans the fourth wall and multiplies the entrances and exits of the characters, the Announcer happily camped by Serge Bagdassarian opens the festivities: “Everything must seem provisional, in progress, sloppy, incoherent, improvised in enthusiasm! (…) Order is the pleasure of reason: but disorder is the delight of the imagination.” Here we are embarked on the love epic between Don Rodrigue and Dona Prouhèze (Marina Hands) which, although impossible, nonetheless consumes their being for three decades that Paul Claudel cuts up and scatters into four days at the time of conquistadors. Proof that it is easier to conquer lands than hearts and that violence achieves its ends more quickly than the integrity of a soul torn between the demands of faith and the hurricane of passion.
The crossroads of all theaters
Summarizing the plot is not only impossible but futile; it is enough to know that traveling the world on a theater stage in a disheveled cavalcade of thwarted loves, of noble or vengeful ambitions, all equally subject to the indomitable course of time, amounts for Éric Ruf to making the Salle Richelieu the crossroads of all theaters: vaudeville, tragedy, farce, comedy, without forgetting the ballet theater dear to Molière through the presence of musicians alongside the troupe in a form Olympic, nothing is missing from the party.
The satin shoeby Paul Claudel, stage version, scenography and direction by Eric Ruf. Until April 13, Salle Richelieu, Comédie-Française.
