May 27 @ 8:30 pm – July 12 @ 11:30 pm
«Molière’s last piece begins in the hues of a finishing day. It is a crepuscular comedy tinged with bitterness and melancholy.”
It is with these words that Claude Stratz, now deceased, depicts Le Malade imaginaire which he staged in 2001, and which, played more than 500 times since then, is one of those timeless shows visited by generations of comedians and actors from the Troupe. The refined staging restores the infinite palette of this comedy-ballet.
February 10, 1673, Molière, in the role of Argan, creates his new work where it is question of a true or a false sick person, of a true or a false doctor, of a true or a false master of music, of a true comedy but with dramatic accents. Seven days later, while he was giving the fourth performance of the play, the lung disease that he had just contracted forced him to stop and took him away a few hours later. Attempting from then on to see the shadow of the dying playwright hovering over the character of Argan, who “in his own misfortune chooses to make us laugh,” even if history teaches us that Molière was not suffering when he wrote his last play. If the charlatanism of doctors is a privileged theme of the author, it is medical science itself that is attacked in this satirical farce, coupled with a dark and lucid meditation on the fear of death. Victim of the intrigues of Lully, in royal disgrace, killed by the death of his son and his lifelong friend, Madeleine Béjart, Molière nevertheless delivers here one of his most brilliant comedies.
