Paul Claudel’s work-world | France TV & you

Almost 40 years after the version proposed by Antoine Vitez, Paul Claudel’s masterpiece is preparing to find the Honor of Avignon, for six performances, in the staging with which Éric Ruf made his farewell to the Comédie-Française last December. France Télévisions offers a capture produced by Arnaud Desplechin in the Richelieu room in Paris. Four episodes to see from Saturday July 19 at 22.00 on France.TV.

Flush piece, monument of literature and theater, mystical drama, poetic, love, historical, autobiographical, comic …, TheSatin shoe is a separate work, rare and extraordinary, both for spectators – it has finally been little mounted for almost a century – as for the actors, who dream and fear to rub it as cyclists at Mont Ventoux (dixit Éric RUF).
Written between 1918 and 1924, published in 1929, deemed for a long time impossible to represent because of its magnitude – eleven at twelve o’clock! – and staging constraints, The satin shoe was not created until 1943-and in a shortened version-, at the Comédie-Française, by Jean-Louis Barrault, who succeeded in convincing Claudel to set up the play and faces all the risks to make it play in the midst of a German occupation. Barrault will also continue to return to this text since he will rework his staging and will propose it again, in a longer form, in 1963 at the Odéon-Théâtre de France, then in full in 1980 at the Théâtre d’Orsay. Two other striking staging was offered in 1987 by Antoine Vitez in Avignon and by Olivier PS in 2003 at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

Everything has to look temporary, on the move, sloppy, incoherent, improvised in enthusiasm! With successes, if possible, from time to time, because even in disorder you must avoid monotony. Order is the pleasure of reason, but disorder is the delight of imagination.

Paul Claudel

This world work, made up of four “days”, is deployed over two decades from Europe to South America via the African coasts, during the Spanish Renaissance and the conquest of the Western Indies. She tells the story of intense and impossible love of Rodrigue and Doña Prouhèze, the wife of Governor Don Pélage. A largely autobiographical subject, since he marks the appeasement of the author, the resolution and the conclusion of a great love passion that has already inspired him Noon In 1905. « We attacked this epic with humility and gluttonysaid Éric Ruf, Approaching the secret of the poet hidden within these four days, or how does Claudel inscribe his illicit love in a liturgy as learned as it is. »(Source: Comédie-Française)
This rereading of Claudel’s play by Éric Ruf is both a summary of the actor’s career, director, decorator and scenographer, who entered the Comédie-Française in 1993 (notably evoking the happy memory of another river piece, the Formerly peer From Ibsen mounted in 2012), a farewell to the troop, of which he has been the administrator since 2014, and a tribute to all his actors, musicians, technicians, etc. The seven hours of this staging pass like a light and haunting dream and make the “good word” attribute sometimes to Sacha Guitry, sometimes to Jean Cocteau: ” The satin shoe … Fortunately there is no pair! ».