With his proverbs, Musset renews the comedy of manners in a free form that he develops into something much more than simple entertainment, enriching it with a moral dimension. An immediate success when premiered in 1848, this proverb in an act performed every year at the Comédie-Française between 1910 to 1970 had not been revived since 1980. For his first staging with the Troupe, which he knows well, having been assisted many directors, including Ivo van Hove for the production of Les Damnées, programmed this season, Laurent Delvert has chosen this play that he has carried with him for nearly twenty years. “I grew up with it”, he says. He has Musset’s dialogues resound in a loft-workshop space, a modern salon steeped in urban agitation, a floating island conducive to bringing out the intimate and social issues of the meeting between the Marquise and the Count who doesn’t dares to ask for her hand. But on this day, by a happy coincidence of bad weather or perhaps as the result of female wiles, he is the only one invited to her home. A verbal joust ensues, a “magnificent and sensual if not to say feral confrontation, in which tension and desire mingle”. Laurent Delvert is equally interested in our acts of resistance and in how we let our lives glide gently by without making choices. “Would you close that door!” repeats the young woman, exhorting her suitor s to surrender himself to the “unknown”.

ALFRED DE MUSSET is both the child prodigy of Romanticism and the least performed of the Romantics, at least during his lifetime. At the age of 20, he presented La Nuit vénitienne (The Venetian Night) at the Odéon, a first attempt... and a first failure that prompted him to turn away from the theatre, to free himself from the constraints of stage and write plays gathered in a volume entitled Spectacle dans un fauteuil (Theatre in an Armchair). These plays were intended for reading only, with no plans to stage them. And yet, Musset went on to become one of the most frequently performed authors of the Repertoire. His proverb-form play Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A Door Must Be Kept Open or Shut), is quite typical of this unique status he enjoys.

Catastrophic premiere, lasting success

In 1848, Musset was personally and artistically at a low ebb suffering from chronic depression and sentimental disappointments, alcohol and drugs had dried up his inspiration and he was writing less and less. On the eve of the Revolution, a providential event saved him from poverty: when the actress Madame Allan-Despréaux returned from Russia, where she had performed his plays, and joined the Comédie-Française, it boosted his career.

Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée was premiered at the height of the Revolution, on 7 April 1848, at the Théâtre-Français, now named Théâtre de la République. With a running time of about forty minutes, the play seemed totally at odds with its time in a context where the July monarchy had been overthrown and Paris was a bloody battlefield. Only a few dozen people came to applaud it. Ironically, the day before, the theatre was packed for the free republican performance, which honoured three muses and three loves of Musset: George Sand, his great childhood passion, Pauline Viardot, a singer with whom he had fallen in love but who didn’t reciprocate, and the actress Rachel, who performed the Marseillaise and thus embodied Freedom and the Republic.

The critics didn’t take Musset very seriously. He seemed out of step with his era, an eccentric whose work, though constant, was deemed to be a touch old-fashioned. Indeed, in the revolutionary context, plays were judged on the basis of their political morality, with regard to the recent upheavals, and so Musset’s play was defended only by his friend Théophile Gautier.

And yet, while the critics were mostly negative and the premiere almost deserted, the play was performed 52 times in its first year. Mussetian proverbs quickly found their place in the alternating calendar and were very frequently revived in years to come.

• Visual: Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée by Alfred de Musset, 1937 – photo. Manuel frères, coll. CF

Directed by: Laurent Delvert
Scenography: Philippine Ordinaire
Costumes: Christian Lacroix
Lights: Nathalie Perrier
Sound: mme miniature