La Comédie-Française

Paris, sum­mer 2020. Actors from “la Comédie-Française”, France’s most pres­ti­gious the­ater, rehearse Christophe Hon­oré’s new play, an adap­ta­tion of Mar­cel Proust’s “The Guer­mantes Way”. When the show is sud­den­ly can­celed, the dra­ma group decides to go ahead with it any­way, in the name of art and for the joy of act­ing together.

Theater play "George Dandin" played by the "Comédie française" in 1999.

Alceste loves Célimène, a flirtatious woman from the Parisian high society. He loathes this world for its hypocritical etiquette but, shaken by a public trial he is called to by this social circle, he must visit Célimène to ask for her help…

Harpagon, a miserly bourgeois, wishes to marry the young Mariane and marry his daughter Elise to Lord Anselme. He does not know that Cléante, his son, is in love with the young Mariane and that his daughter Elise loves a penniless young man, Valère, whom he has just hired as a steward.

Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.

Mise-en-scène, at the Comédie-Française, of La Vie de Galilée by Bertolt Brecht. This is the last staging by Antoine Vitez.

Video recording of the stage play "Le Soulier de Satin", played by La Comédie-Française at Paris during the 2024-2025 season, and directed for the stage by Eric Ruf. The play was recorded by Arnaud Desplechin.

For her latest project, commissioned by Arte and starring members of the Comédie-Française, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (A Castle in Italy, Rendez-Vous 2014) shot an idiosyncratic, half-modernized adaptation of one of Chekhov’s greatest, most expansively melancholy plays.

The life and work of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), the greatest French-language playwright, Molière, who revolutionized theater by bringing to the stage, with lucidity and dazzling modernity, the themes of his time and who had a special relationship with Louis XIV, the dazzling Sun King, that allowed him to develop as an artist while using his talent, like that of many other artists of his time, to enhance his personal glory.

At Versailles, the last rehearsal of a play, ordered to molière by Louis XIV the king. Staged in their own characters, actors and author display their art's conception. It is, too, the opportunity for them to answer by irony to their detractors.

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth on 15 January 2022, Ivo van Hove reunited with the Troupe for their third collaboration, a production of Le Tartuffe ou l’Hypocrite, the original version in three acts, banned at its premiere in 1664 and reconstructed thanks to the work of ‘theatrical genetics’ overseen by Georges Forestier and Isabelle Grellet.

Cyrano has a prominent nose but also a gift with words by which he helps handsome Christian to conquer Roxane. Also in love with the girl he chooses not to reveal to her that every word of Christian comes out of his own heart. In cinema, this ROSTAND classic filmed live from the Comédie Française.

M. Jourdain is a cloth merchant who wants to become a gentleman, learning dance, music, fencing and philosophy. Mme Jourdain is worried about Dorante's expenses and prefers her daughter Lucile to marry Cléonte. The two young men's servants use subterfuge to get M. Jourdain to accept Cléonte as son-in-law. They fake the arrival of the Grand Turk's son in Paris, and, in an Oriental ballet, confer upon M. Jourdain the title of Mammamouchi, his daughter marrying the son of the Grand Turk, who is none other than Cléonte in disguise.