Paris (AFP)
He is a writer against whom directors and directors have crashed: Marcel Proust invites himself from Wednesday to the Comédie-Française thanks to Christophe Honoré, who tries a "reading" of the author deemed unsuitable.
The director, screenwriter and director advance, half jokingly, that it is his "Breton and stubborn side" which pushed him to transpose "Le Côté de Guermantes", third volume of "In search of time lost".
And to somehow make up for the time lost after the postponement of the first, initially scheduled for spring, due to an epidemic.
"When I said to Eric (Ruf, general administrator of the Comédie-Française) + why not Proust? +, He replied: + many directors who have promised me adaptations have always ended up giving up the case, "Christophe Honoré told AFP.
A company that is a bit of a jerk, also on the big screen: in the cinema, Luchino Visconti or Joseph Losey had to throw in the towel;
Volker Schlöndorff attempted a "Swann's Love" (1984) deemed passable despite a five-star cast.
Only Raoul Ruiz's "Le Temps Recovered" (1999) could, according to critics, be more or less faithful to the Proustian spirit.
- "A memory of reading" -
"Strangely, I find that the cinema does not agree well with Proust because it is the realistic illusion. In the theater, the spectator accepts the metaphor", explains the director of the "Songs of love".
"I don't like the term + adaptation +, that doesn't mean much. You can't compete with the language; you can only evoke a memory of reading, a kind of walk".
In "Le Côté de Guermantes", the longest tome, the narrator moves with his parents to Paris where he moves between two salons, that of Madame de Villeparisis and that of Madame de Guermantes, all against a background of stories of love but also Dreyfus business.
How can this "novel for duchesses", a term used at the time by Proust's detractors, and this volume, "the least loved" of Research, still be of interest in the twenty-first century?
"One can find ridiculous the dream of the narrator, a bourgeois, to access aristocratic salons. But today, young people have other dreams: to access the cinema, to fashion, to a sphere that makes us dream but which can only be deceptive, ”explains Mr. Honoré.
"Many accused Proust of a worldly writer (...). But it is not a story of duchesses; he tries to capture the human soul, our relationship to beauty, to memory, to time passing, to wasted time".
- "Aristocracy of the French theater" -
The two-and-a-half-hour play, with 16 French actors, will be performed not in the historic hall of the "Maison de Molière", closed until January for renovations, but at the Marigny theater.
A place closely linked to the work, and the reason why Honoré chose "Le Côté de Guermantes", since part of the action takes place in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, adjacent to the theater.
The staging "does not aim at modernity, nor at historical reconstruction", says the director, who was based on the dialogues of the book and condensed certain parts for the benefit of others, which will be noted by "the Proustians. pure and hard ".
The Covid-19 crisis, with six months of interruption and the health protocol, did not discourage Christophe Honoré, who had to remove kissing scenes.
Himself an assiduous spectator of the Comédie-Française, the director qualifies the French troupe as ideal for this project because it is "the aristocracy of French theater, while being completely in the present time".
"I'm doing this show for someone who hasn't read Proust", adds the director, who has staged a dozen operas and plays and is preparing at the start of 2021 for a new creation at the Théâtre de l'Odéon .
© 2020 AFP