With “Les Fausses Confidences” by Alain Françon, Marivaux with an open heart

“When love speaks, it is the master, and it will speak. » The man who says it is a valet named Dubois, and he is the deus ex machina death False Confidences. In Marivaux, love speaks, speaks to itself, is said as much to confess as to disguise itself, perhaps it only exists because it speaks to itself, in a form of performativity of words. The games of love are first of all games of language, which mask or deceive as much as it reveals. Language is first for the master of French love, and it is first and foremost that Alain Françon makes us hear, marvelously, in this limpid and subtle show.

Nothing spectacular here. Like a Zen master, Alain Françon seems to refine his gesture from one show to the next, always pushing further his work, which has become rare these days, of Vitézian heritage, on the way in which language passes through the bodies of the actors, allowing both the unsaid and the said of what is being played to surface. And if the entire representation flows clearly, it is because the mixture of naturalness and theatricality at the heart of Marivaux’s art is measured so perfectly that it is no longer visible.

What is at stake here, in this new variation on the matrimonial machination dear to the divine Marivaux? In her home, Araminte, a young widow as beautiful as she is extremely wealthy, will be the object of a strange conspiracy. Needing a new steward, her uncle recommends a young man, Dorante, who has not succeeded as a lawyer and is experiencing a reversal of fortune. In reality, Dorante is trying to enter the square to conquer the beauty, with whom he says he is madly in love, ever since he met her one evening at the opera.

Dorante (“gold, haunts”would say a bad Lacanian play on words) is it really “stamped with love”is he more attracted to Araminte’s social position, or do love and social desire mingle, as they often do in life? There won’t necessarily be an answer. A man pulls the strings, who absolutely wants his foal (his puppet?) to become the master of the place: Dubois, Dorante’s valet, who once served at Araminte. What does he play in this? What is his desire? Is this desire directed towards gold, towards Dorante, towards Araminte? Is this the only pleasure of the manipulator?

In the meantime, Dubois allows Marivaux to deploy his theatrical machinations, with love notes, hidden portraits and false confidences in all directions. So many delightful twists of theater through which he declines, with sparkling brilliance, the themes of the double, the mask, the image of the beloved as it is constructed as a fiction.

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