A few days after the premiere of Phèdre at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, starring Isabelle Huppert in the title role, Krzysztof Warlikowski will delight audiences on the other side of France next Tuesday and Wednesday with a show billed as the theatrical event of the season. By presenting "The French," the Polish director, a major figure in European theater who served as Peter Brook's assistant, invites us to the very heart of our culture with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. It's a real challenge to embark on an adaptation, however free, of this beautiful work that has become a monument of French literature! People like Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti have struggled with this Proustian narrative, which is definitely not made for the stage.
But Krzysztof Warlikowski has chosen a different path, that of a personal reinterpretation of a work he discovered as a teenager. "It's a dialogue between me and the work of Marcel Proust, a foreigner's perspective on the most influential French author in the history of literature," he explains. A perspective on research that escapes the cultural conventions of a national monument. "In France, we don't talk about Jewish Proust. The homosexual Proust, the sick Proust, on the margins of society, is hidden." These are all facets of Proust at the dawn of the First World War that resonate with our current society, between same-sex marriage and the National Front's success.
A reinterpretation that results in a spectacle as extraordinary as Proust's work, with over four and a half hours of performance in Polish with surtitles, interspersed with two intermissions, and a wonderful array of actors on stage, such as Agata Buzek, noted in Anne Fontaine's film The Innocents. All the more reason to rush to grab the few remaining tickets for both performances!
Krzysztof Warlikowski granted us an interview
What is the perspective of a Polish director on Proust's very French work?
When I read Proust in my youth, during the communist era, I found in this text above all the description of a world not lost, but inaccessible, with its inherent charm. I was as vehemently enraptured by Orianne [de Guermantes] as the narrator. Today, I read this novel differently. What strikes me above all is its critical aspect, Proust's sensitivity to the scandals of the time, which are unfortunately not so different from our own. The Dreyfus Affair, which marks the beginning of modern anti-Semitism, constitutes the beginning of the novel, a novel that will end with the Great War. Proust was one of the writers who constructed the image of the end of the world. He compared the Paris of his time to the city of Pompeii, whose inhabitants were lost in dilettantism. He confronted his own homosexuality and his Jewish origins. From this point of view, the nationality of Proust's reader is of lesser importance to me. What interests me most is his sensitivity to the scandal of social life, in the face of the exclusion of different groups and individuals.
Losey and Visconti broke their teeth on Proust. Did you have to be a bit crazy and have worked with people like Peter Brook to dare to shake up this monument?
Adapting In Search of Lost Time is not madness but a completely pointless activity. Proust's novel is a completely separate text, an unadaptable text. When we read it, we find our own paths in it, which, moreover, evolve from one reading to the next. This is why I don't think of my work on this text as an adaptation, but rather as a kind of Proustian installation, or even my own installation within it. As for unrealized film projects, I've read some of Visconti's existing screenplays, and I deeply regret that he didn't have the time to make his film. I think it would have offered culture unforgettable, almost iconic images that would allow Proust to function in the collective imagination.
Who are "the French" you show us?
The French of the play's title constitute the pars pro toto of today's Europe, which is experiencing its melancholy. Melancholy is a kind of illness, and the resulting acedia is an inability to think critically. European elites are consuming the remnants of their past splendor. The European Union, as an intellectual project, is failing, nor even as an economic project, because it is going through a profound crisis. We are all as failed as humanity in Proust. We display the same characteristics of the degeneration of the species, to quote Proust's penchant for botany and zoology. We have the feeling of decline, of the end itself,
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