Fortune once morest particle! On the lookout for a title of nobility, Dandin, a greedy rich peasant, has an idea: to get married. But he forgets a fundamental rule, marriage is a market here, where love has no place! To serve this burlesque and grating fable, Michel Fau, both director and actor, imagines a baroque and nightmarish aesthetic. This musical comedy will be played on April 2 at 8:30 p.m. at the Ducourneau theater in Agen.
After “Le Tartuffe” and “Le Misanthrope”, Michel Fau, actor and prolific director, returns once once more to Molière with the baroque genius and his dreamlike poetry to seize this enjoyable comedy that is “George Dandin”. . A theatrical event for the quadricentenary of the birth of Molière!
This theatrical event was somewhat upset by the health crisis?
“We were supposed to create and perform it two years ago, the set was ready, the costumes too, we were able to rehearse it in very good conditions. In the end, we launched it exactly the year Molière, which was not planned.”
You grew up in Agen, is it a return to your roots?
“Yes and it’s always very moving, I have so many memories of being a teenager in this city, in this theater where I took amateur theater lessons at the Conservatory where I presented the Misanthrope and Fleur de Cactus. My mother still lives there, even if she often comes to see me in Paris or Toulouse when I perform there. I have kept friends there like Béatrice Uria-Monzon, whom I have known since the conservatory, since the age of our twelve years old. I do not despair of staging it in an opera.”
The cast is spectacular, a stage deployment worthy of the Grand Siècle with seven actors, four singers and eight musicians?
“Yes, period costumes reinvented by Christian Lacroix, with whom I am very close and who has always wanted to create theater costumes. ) during musical interludes. Singers intervene between the acts, but little by little they become part of the action.”
How did you revisit this great classic by Molière and its social fable?
“I have remained faithful to the work, but it looks more like a nightmare. We find the notion of power, the world of aristocrats, this upstart peasant who wants to rise in the social ladder. So if social relations have evolved today, human relations remain the same. There is question of marriage, seduction, vanity, themes that are still very current. There is also the idea of entertainment, this peasant who covets a title of nobility makes you laugh the public by its faults.”
This relationship between man and woman also which has evolved?
“Yes, but the dialogues between the two women, the young girl and the servant, are quite insolent for the time. The daughter rebels once morest this marriage of interest and the servant also advocates the freedom of women. A language rather timeless. It is a tragic farce of this deceived husband who, on three occasions, sees the situation turn once morest him in a cyclothymic way. A work served by the very beautiful and convoluted writing of Molière, precious and refined. It is a mixture of tragic feelings and derision. It speaks of a human catastrophe on a mode of humor distanced. The text and the situations lend themselves to laughter and that’s what I like this distance.”
Are you currently on tour?
Yes, from January to April and throughout the month of May, we will play at the Athénée de Louis Jouvet theater in Paris, then in Versailles.
Do you have a new creation in mind or in progress?
“Yes, I’m working more on a work from the 20th century, but for the moment I can’t divulge the project. I alternate comedy with more experimental projects. I’m also going to shoot a film by Francois Ozon this spring and I have to put together an opera in Montpellier “Ariane” by Richard Strauss.”
Director, actor in the main role of George Dandin, actor, are you very creative and hyperactive?
“Yes, but I took a step back from Parisian life, which became a little sad in the evening. I live in Normandy, I work in a more serene way, I who never thought I would live in the provinces, and who swore that by Paris when I arrived there in the 80s.”
Love is at the heart of Dandin, despite this marriage of convenience?
“The story is fierce, he thought he might invent a great love story, have a perfect wife, be a model couple, but that can’t be invented. Love must remain mysterious. The character suffers, is badly treated by servants, his wife, libertines and aristocrats.”
What is your touch in the staging of George Dandin?
“I tried to highlight the outrageous, excessive and nightmarish side of the story by pushing very far the slider of the farce, the grotesque and the terrifying, but also by bringing a part of dream. The spectators want to get out of their daily lives by coming to the theatre.”
How did you imagine the sets?
“In a house with floors that symbolize social levels, Dandin is downstairs, the aristos upstairs and then it is reversed at times. And the costumes of Christian Lacroix reflect the social position. The ruined aristos in-laws have many rich clothes, but patinated, the singers of the court of Versailles are dressed in red, gold and black, and the young girl has a sublime dress.
