Paris (AFP)

No audience, no direct, but winners anyway: health constraints have transformed the Molières 2020 into a new edition, broadcast Tuesday evening on France 2 after being pre-recorded over four days before a handful of nominees.

The organizers themselves do not know what this ceremony will look like, which awards the most prestigious theater prizes in France each year. But they hope that it will "bring back to light" a living art particularly shaken by the coronavirus.

When almost all of the stages, already at the end of the season and still subject to a gauge restriction, are stopped, the Molières 2020 took place in two stages to comply with the rules of distancing.

Act I: recording of the presentation of the 19 prizes as well as dance, song and music numbers at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Act II: a clever montage, to which tributes will be added, in particular to the comedian Guy Bedos and a "best of" of the highlights of the Molières since their creation in 1987.

Sunday afternoon at Châtelet, the atmosphere was a bit strange, but good-natured.

Forty people, mostly named, in suits and evening dresses, enter in a dropper, filmed by masked cameramen, and settle in the floor of the 2,000-seat hall. Among them, Alexis Michalik, the gifted of the French theater, the humorist Alex Lutz or even the great lady of the Comédie-Française Dominique Blanc.

On the illuminated stage, France 2 journalist Marie-Sophie Lacarrau acts as mistress of ceremony, accompanied in turn by the president of Molières and owner of Parisian theaters Jean-Marc Dumontet, actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin or actresses Audrey Fleurot and Isabelle Carré.

If the suspense is there, the winners a little taken aback do not really know how to react, since they were asked to ... stay in their place at the announcement of their name.

- "Caught off guard" -

Ovated by their colleagues, they get up, they hand them the microphone - with a disinfectant wipe -, the jokes burst out in the face of this unprecedented situation.

"The artists are moved even without the decorum. They are caught off guard because normally it is something that you share with a whole room that trembles", commented to AFP Mr. Dumontet who had insisted that this ceremony be held to "put the theater back in the spotlight".

"We want to tell the public + keep coming to the theater +, we're ready," he adds.

"The actors are at the same time in an incredible expectation and then do not really know how to go about it, + can I let my joy burst, + it creates amazing little moments", says Marie-Sophie Lacarrau.

At one point, feeling a little floating in the air, she asked this small audience to ignore the constraints of the recording. "Another break?" wonders at the microphone a teasing Darroussin because of the many interruptions to allow adjustments to the control room.

Highlights from previous editions, organized in crowded rooms, are viewed on small screens suspended above the stage, a bit like a vision of "the old world".

Those present must keep their tongue until Tuesday evening, when the Molières will be broadcast, something rare, in prime time, at 9:00 p.m.

In the public theater, a tight duel opposes "La mouche", a success at Bouffes du nord, with "Electre des bas-fonds" by Simon Abkarian presented at the Théâtre du Soleil by Ariane Mnouchkine.

In the private sector, Michalik's play "A love story" will face, among other things, "Red" with Niels Arestrup.

In the room, faced with health restrictions, we decided to laugh.

"The theater actor is not a prerecorded actor", we joke in the floor.

"We all played when we started in front of four people," said Alex Lutz. "And there we say, ah it's so good, in fact, when the room is full!".

© 2020 AFP