King Lear

Lear, or the search for the base and the summit. At the top of the summit, a king. At the very bottom of the base, a bastard. The king stands in the center and the heart of the country; the bastard grew up in shadows and in a foreign land. One day, the king tears apart his kingdom and throws his crown to the ground. Then he leaves. When he leaves, he will join a new domain, an outside that no king has ever known. Something like exterior gloom that might resemble the real world. What does that mean? Is it possible? What happened?

This very old king committed a grave mistake. He wanted to divide his country between his three daughters according to how much they love him. For this, he has organized a contest of filial piety. He has even rigged it so that his favorite daughter, the youngest, will surely win the best portion. Except that Cordelia, exactly because she easily deserves to win this love contest, acts as if it were more than anything a test of sincerity. Result: the division becomes destruction. With several violent, explosive moves, Lear disinherits her in favor of her sisters, banishes the faithful Kent who took her defense, and only conserves his title, stripped of power, and an escort with whom he travels between the homes of his sons-in-law.

Thus begins the tragedy in which, according to A.W. Schlegel, Shakespeare "descends...to the deepest depths of pity." The beginning seems at first to be as frank and clear as a morality play from the Middle Ages. But the medieval order casts its last rays of light. Abandoned by almost everyone, homeless, losing his mind, Lear becomes the subject of a horrible experience. As if the king of old, who used to reign over an ordered world, was rushed into the chaos of modern times right before our eyes, but also, in a senseless way, seeking a mortal condition to which nothing had ever been promised.

Lear believed he had mastered aestheticism: wandering homeless in the tempest, he eventually tears off his clothes before going mad. Meanwhile, Edmond the bastard wants to go from the outside to the inside, from shadow to full light. Now that he is back in the family home, there is no way he will allow himself to be thrown out again. Edmond wants to rise up, grow, establish himself; he wants to return home and never leave again, expelling his half-brother, Edgar, on the way, then his own father. Nature, including social and political nature, hates emptiness; yet nature is the only goddess that Edmond calls upon. Also, the old king's retirement makes a vacant place that the ambitious young man is made to occupy. He does he best to get it - until the fateful day when he disappears, carried away by his own powerful expansion, the way a bubble bursts. Lear and Edmond, who only meet once and never speak, hold onto each other on the pans of a horrible scale. The fall of one, the rise of the other, are two aspects of a twofold movement: a summit that collapses and becomes bare and a base that expands and rises. Between the two, the entire world seems to split open like a wound. Several destinies try to sew the two sides back together as best as they can. It's not certain they can succeed.

André Engle has thought of attempting Lear for years, of investigating the turmoil of this scale that no law holds in its hands, of following its oscillations until the ultimate breaking point. After Büchner, after Horvath, Engle returns to the Odeon (where he will now perform as an associate artist) to question and adapt Shakespeare in his own way. Most of his cast comes from the small circle of actors who made "The Last Judgment" a critical and commercial success. As for the title role, it has been entrusted to Michel Piccoli.