2011 · La Place Royale (The Royal Square) · Corneille · Vigner (EN)

"I seek freedom in imprisonment." [1]

Room for the Young

"It is as though it was inevitable for a person at his most theatrical, inconstant, artful, extravagantly out-of-the-ordinary, to establish himself, once and for all, on the stage, right in the modern world, on this 'Royal Square' put on stage, socially attuned to the great enjoyment - and the even greater embarrassment - of the audience. For, if the character of Alidor surely stands for liberty and deliberately chosen solitude, if he propounds the idea that there may be such a thing as self-love, a passion for one's self that is more than just amour-propre, this also shows that the will of this lone wolf to dominate may well be a stronghold and at the same time a place of refuge, a victory and a makeshift, libertinism and a cardinal sin. So, what we are actually faced with is a libertine of the stage.

Between 1629 and 1635, Corneille wrote six plays which raised him to the rank of the best contemporary writer of comedies and one of the principal suppliers of texts for the Mondory company at the Théâtre du Marais. Mélite, La Veuve, La Galerie du Palais, La Suivante, La Place royale and l’illusion comique make him a kind of modern-day Terence, a considerable time before Molière. For, what is new is that the young people created by Corneille are not just youngsters that resist their father who wants to marry them against their will and who persuade their servants, much to the entertainment of the audience, to abet their marriage plans and help them solve their financial problems. No, they are adults, they take their destiny in their own hands and play their role with virtuosity. The author's objective is no longer, as Aristotle described it, to caricature by way of a comedy scoundrels and persons of low character, but to design a 'young' and 'modern' plot around a marriage intrigue and all sorts of obstacles to be overcome, full of misunderstandings, quid pro quo's, trickery and even acts of villainy among the young people themselves. Thus, for Corneille only the theatre can give life to this hotchpotch of contradictions, only the theatre can refuse to choose one solution and offer several of them at once, and permit the young people involved to opt, traditionally and according to the canon, for a marriage that is not devoid of comical aspects, to melodramatically retreat into religious life or, quite bizarrely, to turn to inconstancy and licentiousness. Corneille does not decide in favour of the young couple nor of the future nun who is to assume the name Elvire, nor yet of the proto-Don Juan: he leaves them to their own devices, just noting that the one and only winner is the theatre, as it interests the readers and spectators."
CHRISTIAN BIET

"Declaiming the alexandrine is neither prose nor music." [2]

"Verse is the visual form of thought." [3]

"Reading a poem is a ceremony. This is not merely an appreciation ("aesthetic judgment"). A poem that begins with "O Death..." is enough to turn the mind of a well-intentioned reader in a certain direction, to impart to him or her a certain attitude, a certain posture (be it conventional or natural, which matters little, as it is in fact a non-problem). All at once - generally when the very first verse is read - the reader knows what it is all about. (When I use as an example the beginning "O Death..." it is not really the word 'death' - which is already a much closer specification - that I have in mind but the interjection "Oh", which suffices as a key to the poem, while the word 'death' , if I may say so, may rather be seen to have the function of a 'lock'. The "Oh!" is less explicit, we still have to wait, to expect something like "Oh how much...". The alexandrine is no longer what it used to be. In our day and age it is for the poet what makes him similar to the poets that everybody knows, while formerly it was merely a means of seduction meant for an audience to whom it was something new." [4]

"The setting has been provided for a group of actors from different countries and horizons, who have come for a fairly long stay - but less long than the time Plato's disciples spent at his Academy: Think of Aristotle, who stayed for twenty years, or of the educational curriculum outlined in the Republic, which suggests that the apprenticeship of dialectics can hardly be completed before the age of fifty, after which the toughest among the students might finally reach the crowning event of their years of learning: the vision of the Good. To pursue this comparison further, the Académie of Lorient is working on three plays, and the role of the founder and stage director is largely to present problems to be solved - not theoretical ones as those with which the Platonists dealt but problems of pronunciation, versification, of meanings, of movement on the stage, of gestures... One moment of particular importance in the life of the European academies, it would seem to me - and it is significant that it coincides with the moment of the creation of the la Place royale, the first of the pieces Éric Vigner has chosen for his Académie - was the "Grand siècle", the classical age, the 17th century. The crossing of frontiers - between epochs, styles, the kinds of questions asked, anxieties -, the way these young people meet to jointly work on texts fraught with these questions may well have the same effect as the clashing of stones of which Plato speaks metaphorically as the precondition for the spark of truth to arise. In the Academy, this had a name derived from its parent word, the practice of dialogue, which illustrates Plato's genius: dialectics."
JEAN-CLAUDE MONOD

"Alidor, tu consens qu'un autre la possède !
Tu t'exposes sans crainte a des maux sans remède !
Ne romps point les effets de son intention
Et laisse un libre cours à ton affection :
Fais ce beau coup pour toi : suis l'ardeur qui te presse,
Mais trahir ton ami ! mais trahir ta maitresse !
Je n'en veux obliger pas un à me haïr
Et ne sais qui des deux, ou servir, ou trahir.
Quoi ! je balance encor, je m'arrête, je doute !
Mes résolutions, qui vous met en déroute ?" [5]