Paris // Studio de la comédie française: chanson douce by Leïla Slimani, a former student at the Lycée Français Descartes in Rabat (Morocco)

Studio de la Comédie Française - Paris

Chanson douce by Leïla Slimani, a former student at the Lycée Français Descartes in Rabat (Morocco)
Directed by Pauline Bayle

From March 14 to April 28, 2019

With her trademark art of montage, Pauline Bayle seizes on "Chanson douce", a tragic fable, to offer a variation on the figure of the monster and its ambivalences.

In adapting this novel, winner of the 2016 Goncourt Prize, Pauline Bayle - who made a name for herself with her stagings of The Illiad and The Odyssey - opts, after three years spent working on the great founding myths, for a plunge into the most contemporary intimacy. Inspired by a 2012 New York crime story, Chanson douce tells the story of Louise, hired as a babysitter by a "Parisian bobo" couple, who becomes the mainstay of the household and soon the murderer of the children.
What drove the Mary Poppins-like "nanny", immediately adopted by the children and adored by the parents, to commit this crime? How did she manage to make herself indispensable, and how did the relationship of dependence reverse until it closed in on her? La nourrice gives the director the opportunity to tackle a central figure in the theatrical repertoire, from Aeschylus and Euripides to Jean Genet's Bonnes. Louise's story is a perfect match between Flaubert's novella Un cœur simple, one of his bedside books, and the fate of Medea. According to Pauline Bayle, the novel's impact lies in the fact that it is written without sentimentality or Manicheism. In Louise, a sort of ogress with a disconcerting fragility, and in the parents, torn between the utopia of family happiness and professional fulfillment, she finds modern characters who reshuffle the cards of master-slave relationships. Eschewing anecdote, she points out the irony contained in this unfiltered portrayal of our own demons, broken by a generalized good conscience. And with her trademark montage skills, she seizes on this tragic fable to offer a variation on the figure of the monster and its ambivalences.

NEW PRODUCTION