Pierre Corneille will be nearly 400 years

Pierre Corneille will be nearly 400 years. The quadricentenaire of his birth June 6, 1606 in Rouen is already the subject of some attention but, official powers have not decreed a national commemoration, the anniversary raises a number of events for a limited time. Has the author of the "Cid" and "Liar" become, for us, today, a glorified glory That is our culture so remote from the time of Louis XIII and Richelieu It is not the first time that it was rejected in a dusty Pantheon! In his lifetime, he was less flattered that his brother Thomas, today completely forgotten author. In 1951, when Jean Vilar was appointed the role of the "Cid" to Gérard Philipe, the tragicomedy of Rodrigue was part of the curriculum but was almost more scope to the scene.

The old debate Crow-root a duty against the passion, the men as they should be and what they are, etc. a hard life. But it is changing. The current approach is much more sensitive. Our very Christian, policy, crazy story, a passionate man magnet count property in the Sun, wrote a work complex, contradictory, noble and cheerful. And if, all things considered, it was more the love that responsibility, the human pain more than the Stoic height

The comedy cessation

A brief overview of his life of author is sufficient to move the lines of an academic vision. Young, the son of a master of waters and forests Norman wrote that comedies. Foothold in Paris living Rouen was not impossible: Rouen was the second city of France. At the age of twenty-six, he became a fashionable author. Man dress who lived long of his profession of lawyer between Rouen and the capital, he spent in the noble kind, with "The Cid" that he was playing at the age of thirty-one years and which won him so much hate that friendship both wearing gender and language to their perfection. Aside from the two exceptions of "Liar" and "The Suite of liar", he relinquished then totally comedy. Finished stories of young people drunk by the pleasures of love and seduction!

In this second half of existence, the imagination of Crow is lost and is found in the fury of Mythology ("Oedipus") and conflicts of different waves of Roman history ("Horace", "polyeucte", "Surena"), with raids in the past, these barbarians Parthians ("Rodogune") and these sacripants of Lombards ("Pertharite"). Him, the unruly fierce rallied compelled and forced the three famous units of classical theatre (place, time and action unit). The decline him no less fell on the shoulders. On the later, victim of a relative disdain, he could not ignore that glory had left him to join his brother Thomas gentil and this great upstart named Jean Racine.

This was the path of his life, dedicated to gravity, but belatedly, ranging from the more spontaneous juvenile love in the most violent imaginary passions. Christian Biet has just published a small and precious book on Corneille. It is one of our great connoisseurs of the classic century, he taught at Paris X-Nanterre. For him, began to look at the author of "Cinna" to an another look from the trial of Jean Schlumberger, "Fun to Crow", in 1936. The term of "fun" put an end to centuries of austere comments. "In rediscovering the comedies, it understood that Crow spoke of youth, that it was in their feelings and social problems", says Christian Biet. "It is also modern in many other ways." It was in France, the first professional of playwriting, he installed the business, its rights, its revenues. Found in him something that announces the "distancing" from Brecht and more questions than answers. It ensure that issues are contradictory in its process of creation and that at the end of his plays the Viewer is forced to play with the questions and thinking with him.

A small air of French cinema

The world of theatre, in the same movement as researchers, gradually changed the lighting. Another look came from the town of Corneille in Rouen, in the 1970s and 1980s. Alain Bézu, patron of the theatre of the two - banks, gave an unreported brightness to the comedy of youth. Its vision of "mélite", "La Galerie du Palais", "La Place Royal", presented in Normandy and then to Aubervilliers, caused a shock. At this moment, he rises once again "L'illusion comique" and continues to think, as thirty years ago, as Crow, that is, in a certain way, Eric Rohmer. "There is in his plays a word that is never pronounced and that is all the time, it is the desire", he says when we will see his last (very successful) staging in Rouen. "I like especially the".

works of the young Crow. There is a burst, an invention of forms, an Erotica I love. Yes, I was talking about Rohmer once, because those parts that relate the young people before major commitments, are very close to the "moral tales". There is never a single truth. She eludes us, that's it, the baroque, it is this which is modern!

After Alain Bézu, a young woman Director, Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, is stubbornly attached to be heard in Crow that our grandparents had not wanted to listen to: privacy, secret wounds, his fear of love, in a way the root nature of Corneille. It climbed many of his pieces, "Sertorius", "Surena", "L'illusion comique"... "The Cid", just the Comédie-Française to the poster, it is also (this is is unfortunately not his most advanced show). Unforgettable stage joined the equation of Bézu for which young Crow equalled the young French cinema. "Royal Place", where young people flirtaient polo and skirt tiles, café terraces, was a marvel that borrowing not to Rohmer but Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol. A delicacy who said in the drunkenness that Crow was and remained for always the "new wave".

A father for Planchon

Jean-Marie Villégier, Giorgio Strehler, Jean-Pierre Miquel, Christian Schiaretti, Jean-Louis Benoit also helped turn the embodiment of cornéliennes works. Women were often the most attached to the renewal of his theatre. In addition to Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, should cite Arlette Téphany, who set up a very nice "Rodogune", and Marion Bierry, which put in scene "Horace" in the private circuit that will soon rise "L'illusion comique". "Crow proposes a moral question but it is not a moral author, said Marion Bierry." Which wreaks havoc in his theatre, is the force of the thought, the beauty. In "The comic Illusion", it is more revolutionary than Marivaux on love relationships. Elsewhere, it is enjoy immoral characters and takes us in the pain of humans. Female characters provides a dimension out of the ordinary which is both in the Greek descent and the novelty of modern times.

All artists do not share this enthusiasm. Jean-Claude Fall, Director of the thirteen winds to Montpellier, advocate of a modern theatre of Brecht to Jon Fosse, is without appeal: "Crow, is built, dry cold." Too rational! "Roger Planchon has, on the contrary, much to say. Paradoxically, it was never staged a piece of Crow, while he made the classic century his land of election. "I have for him a mere admiration, he explains." It's like a father. I like it that I do not like root, which has fascinated me as a serpent. I regret not mounted comedies, but, for people of my generation, there were Vilar. I have been away from Crow by the contribution of Vilar, it could not do anything at the same time as him and after him. As the author, a part of my inspiration comes from Crow. My film "Louis, child King" was totally inspired by him. Person remarked, no critic wrote. But the end of feudalism, these great nobles who will die, it is the heart of the theater of Corneille and this is just my film. This is crow that taught me to read the story.

The teachers shared

On the education front, Crow remains secure and compulsory value. But loved evil "Le cid" is the fourth classes program. Odile Ehret, playwright who is also Professor of French at the Paul Gauguin in Paris College, think that students enter quite easily in this piece: "to blow up the dam of the language, it is the duty of the teacher, and it arrives! It is better support its pedagogy by videos. I turn the film of the flamenco scene of the "Cid" of Thomas the Douarec implementation, but I would like to have some other staged to show them. Young people like especially Rodrigue and Chimène, but they do not include the Infanta. The theme of the hero of interest. Both better if a pupil recites me replicas in rap! "Christian Biet, to its Chair of faculty, professes not quite the same optimism:"Need enthusiasm to remove students the idea that the author of "Titus and Berenice" lost to root because it was old." We forget too that Crow was young!

As researchers, they continue to work as and when! Can still be found new on Corneille. For example, English, Howe, studied the way in which the writer was working with his publishers: it was a master of the contract and the development of texts. Long hair (he rarely wears a wig on portraits), moustache and fly the man which consists a mask, the black eye, Crow enters the flow of the 21st century as a young man. The old man, reflux won the...