WFH at the Maison de Molière: the Comédie-Française’s use of rehearsal to respond to Covid-19

Abstract

ABSTRACT France’s policy of confinement in response to Covid-19 posed an existential threat to theatres. The Comédie-Française responded with a range of digital and cinematic programming. This article examines Christophe Honoré’s film Guermantes (2021), created following the cancellation of his stage adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes, and Théâtre à la table, a series of staged readings posted to YouTube between November 2020 and June 2021. These projects are notable for how they centred rehearsal. The article shows how the Comédie-Française mobilised the intimacy of the rehearsal room to compensate for the loss of corporeal presence, and then interrogates Guermantes’s argument for the aesthetic value of rehearsal as an end in itself. However, while these works claim to show the process rather than the product, they in fact show little of the repetitive work of the répétition. Both were also preceded by rehearsals to which audiences were not given access. Noting the proliferation in recent years of rehearsal diaries and documentaries in France, the article concludes by arguing that the Comédie-Française’s response to the pandemic reflects a broader interrogation in contemporary French theatre of the aesthetic value of the rehearsal.