Where do I even begin? The administrator of the French state theater company, Comedie-Francaise, is up for reappointment in August after eight years at the helm. The backstabbing and level of political intrigue going on are worthy of a bad novel, which will only be surprising to people who don't know the appeal of power. I spend a fair amount of my time in Washington, DC, so it turns out I have a very good idea of how attractive power can be. I don't have a lot of time to write this post due to other commitments so you'll have to forgive me for not developing all the ideas as much as I'd normally do - it'll be a "stream of consciousness" post a la James Joyce - but I still wanted to share my thoughts about what's going on or at least provide the perspective of a French person reading French newspapers online from the East Coast in the US.
First, the lady-administrator. I don't know how things were before her appointment because I didn't follow French theater for many years, but when I returned to Paris in 2012 I was impressed by all the events that try to establish a connection between actors and audience, in particular "Ecole d'acteur" (a monthly program where an actor, in conversation with a radio journalist, shares some key moments in his or her artistic development). All performing arts organizations nowadays talk about audience engagement, but the Comedie-Francaise, with its resident troupe, its three theaters in Paris and its productions just about every day of the week, is in a unique position to bring audience engagement to a whole new level -- especially in conjunction with well-publicized movie projects by some of the actors that may turn them into household names among a large section of the general public. It seems that a few male actors get a lot of "interest" from the 16-to-30-years-old female segment, and perhaps they'd prefer to talk about Moliere rather than receiving tweets from teenage girls with crushes on them, but as social media evolves, this sort of thing may hopefully become less prevalent than, say, live-tweeting by an actor about a role that matters to him or her. So I'll give the administrator credit for starting or continuing this trend of helping build connections between audiences and performers.
She's also come under fire for her highly publicized marriage in her late forties to a TV personality. Apparently some members of the troupe have resented her for that, which (seen from the US where massive coverage of public figures' personal life is much more common) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's my solution to that problem: don't read Voici, don't read Gala (the equivalent to People magazine and the like) and you won't know that she appears in their pages with her husband. And the clincher: an anonymous actor reproaches her to want to change her name, engraved in marble alongside that of other administrators, to add her husband's name to her maiden name. Basically, she wants the name in the marble to be her new legal name. This is apparently a terrible, terrible offense. I'm not kidding. The conversation has officially reached the basement level, but the good news is, it can only improve from there. Only based on what has been written in the papers, it sounds like some actors want to tell her how to run her life in the way they find appropriate, and the bottom line is, it's her life not theirs and she gets to run it the way she pleases. Besides, with sharks like that, I can see how she might have felt she'd never find anyone worth spending her life with before she met the TV personality. She found love late and she's happy about it. Can't people just let her be?
This being said, I'm singularly unimpressed by some of her comments and a lot of the productions created under her watch in recent years (unimpressed is a kind word), especially anything from English-speaking playwrights: Tennessee Williams and A Tramway named Desire, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream, the latter directed by the administrator herself. I haven't seen them, but I've seen pictures, and given all the productions I've seen in the US it doesn't take me long to make a judgment on what this or that new production of an English-speaking playwright will contribute in light of its many predecessors. I can't do that for Moliere or Corneille, but I can do it for Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare without hesitation. Sure, audiences may like those productions (especially if one of the male heartthrobs plays in them), but French audiences won't have seen as many Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare productions, for instance, than their American counterparts. In some cases the only reason they find a recent staging good has to be that they've never seen what good in that case was supposed to look like. I'm thinking in particular about one of the Shakespeare productions, but I will refrain from saying which one.
If I had to hold one thing against the administrator, though, I'd make it her statement that she had asked senior actors (societaires) to direct plays because of budget cuts, although they had directed very few or no plays before. You don't ever want to say something like that. It creates obvious problems of legitimacy and credibility in front of the peers the societaires-directors are supposed to direct. Instead, you want to say something like: "So-and-so has very interesting ideas about this play, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he/she comes up with." If the issue is budget cuts, you make sure the budget cuts are translated into something visible (say, no new costume, and the stage set is one table and one chair in all the scenes) and you also make sure the audiences notice it and you encourage them to complain to elected officials. If the goal is to help societaires gain new skills, which would be a perfectly fine developmental goal, you help them try their hand at directing theater students, for instance - you don't put them in charge of a new production in the national theater. It's just asking for trouble, from directors who spend 100% of their career in the job and don't want newcomers to think it's easy (because it's not), from actors who want to grow and be challenged by veteran directors, from the critics who have a key complaint to make even if they'd have found the play absolutely fine if they hadn't been told. From the administrator of the national troupe, this comes as incredibly naive.
While we're on the topic of naive, nothing beats the societaires sending a letter to the culture minister (basically, their boss's boss) asking her not to reappoint the administrator... and some of them apparently not expecting the letter to be leaked. First, never tell your boss's boss what to do. Present the facts and let him/her reach the conclusion for himself/herself. Second, if you don't want the letter to be leaked, you can bet someone else will (want it to be leaked), and whoever is aware of the letter will know who that is and which side to take to leverage his/her knowledge to maximum effect. That's basic politics. It also makes the societaires look petty and mean-spirited, given the content of the letter that ended up online. (Of course, you also have to keep in mind that some of the journalists may have their opinion of who would be the most deserving candidate, and may reframe what they know to put their favorite candidate under the best light.)
Also, I hope that whoever ends up getting the administrator's job (although for me it'd make sense if it was E.Ruf, since external candidates tend to be more successful in periods of high crisis, the Comedie-Francaise - with excellent attendance records - is definitely not in crisis, and Ruf has proved extremely talented in all the endeavors he's put his mind to over the past 20 years) helps actors find better movie opportunities. Things may change with the mediatization of the YSL movie, in which YSL is played by one of the heartthrobs mentioned above, but in the past I don't think the movie roles offered to Comedie-Francaise stage actors have done their talent justice, and I don't see the point of a stage actor known for his/her amazing leading roles in Chekhov or Racine embarrassing himself or herself on camera for third-rate movies that deserve to be forgotten but, in this age of YouTube and Vimeo, may forever remain, at least in fragments, on the Internet while the actors' best roles on stage are only distant memories in the mind of the lucky few who saw those actors back in the days.
Finally, I think some of the junior actors [pensionnaires] are singularly underused (no one wants to join the Comedie-Francaise to only play the third guard or any role that has no name), and I hope the next administrator will create developmental plans for them outlining what skills they should gain to be promoted to societaires, and committing to giving them the opportunities for them to grow. It occurs to me that being administrator of the Comedie-Francaise is very similar, in a way, to being a professor in a US research university, with doctoral students to mentor and advise while they stretch to reach the next level. You take the heat for your students or actors, you don't let them fall flat on their face if they take more than they can chew or do something stupid, you back them up in public no matter what and you have their best interests at heart so that they can become all that they can be. It's really not that complicated, but it's not for everybody.
I'd write more but I really don't have time for this at the moment. I wrote too much already.
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