"Colonial Corneille"
Nicomède and Suréna have a lot in common: in both plays the subjects at hand are the violence that comes with power and people’s ability to resist. But one of them will make you laugh, and the other cry. Both plays are performed by the same troupe of actors, who remain faithful to the Pandora Company.
At the start, there is Rome. What Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman finds striking is the sheer size of Corneille’s “Roman theatre” – no less than fifteen plays - and the way it evolves: there is a world of difference between Rome in Horace, the first play, and Rome in Suréna, the last one. This gap presents the entire Roman theatre cycle as the description of a historical and political process in which Rome, at first shown in its glory, gradually loses its splendour, its soul even, and finally, ends up disappearing.
Hence the birth, in 1983, of a project for a cycle entitled “Colonial Corneille”, illustrating Corneille’s intention as stated by himself in Nicomède’s advice to the reader: “My main purpose was to depict Roman foreign policies, and how they acted imperiously towards their allied kings, their maxims to prevent those kings from extending their territories, and how the Romans made a point of marching through their vastness when it started to become suspect as it was increasing and becoming considerable through new conquests.”
In this “Colonial Corneille” born out of a sustained collaboration with Jacqueline Lichtenstein*, Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman directed five tragedies by Corneille: The Death of Pompey (1983) and Sophonisbe (1988), followed by a new production of The Death of Pompey (1992) at the Théâtre de la Commune/Pandora (directed by Brigitte Jaques and François Regnault), Suréna (1995) and Sertorius (1997). And finally Nicomède (2008-9).
At the Théatre des Abbesses, Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman thus presents her production of Nicomède and recreates Suréna in a new production, with the same actors for both plays.
François Regnault
* Philosopher, professor at the Sorbonne.
Nicomède, Suréna
The whole action of Nicomède takes place around a huge table, like the ones used today at ceremonial dinner parties thrown for the reception of foreign potentates. Here we discover the private and public moments of a royal family. The production clearly shows the unbridled enjoyment in the exercising of power, and the abjectness linked to a shameful political collaboration. Although the play is called a tragedy, it looks more like a dark farce and, despite the ominous events developing within the play’s framework, it comes very close to the tragic without ever really getting there. It preserves some sense of dignity to the passionate declarations made by young rebels, Nicomède and Laodice, his Armenian fiancée. The theatre in Nicomède is, most of the time, overpowered by baseness, lies and the settling of scores.
In a very different light, Suréna is played at the same table: everyone is getting ready for a great wedding which will seal the friendship between Armenia and the kingdom of Parthia, after the Romans’ unexpected defeat. The table is over-flowing with dishes and flowers, but immediately we can hear the sound of immense pain: that of a young woman, Eurydice, forced into a wedding she refuses with all her soul. She “loves elsewhere”. Love is the main rebel in the palace of the Parthians, even if it leads to the lovers’ death. Contrary to Nicomède, tragedy is present in Suréna. Political lucidity, irony and insolence are of no use anymore. Private pain, doomed desire, jealousy, and finally love, dominate the action and stress the heroes’ elegiac and deadly accents. Whereas Nicomède starts in the morning and ends at night, Suréna starts at night and will end with dawn. The whole play will be a passing of the night towards an unavoidable death. In Corneille’s last play, an extraordinary line guides the whole action: “To love always, to suffer always, to die always.”
Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman
version Française
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