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by Alfred de Musset, directed by Philippe Calvario

Saudade Compagnie & Comédie de Picardie, Théâtre des Gémeaux Parisiens, 15, rue de Retrait, Paris, FRA

January 8-March 30, 2025

Octave: “Il savait combien les illusions sont trompeuses, et il préférait ses illusions à la réalité”

When Alfred de Musset first published Les Caprices de Marianne in 1833, he labelled it a “comédie”. Most people would now call the play a tragedy, although we should remember that Chekhov called all four of his major plays comedies despite their inclusion of deaths and ruined lives. It is partly Musset’s anticipation of Chekhov that makes him seem so modern. But more than that, it is his portrait of an uncaring world where idealism has no place. The current production of Caprices now playing at the Théâtre des Gémeaux Parisiens, brilliantly delineates the steps that lead a story that might have been a comedy into the realm of the bitterest tragedy.

The story begins with a situation derived from ancient comedy – a young man is in love with a girl who is kept in a house by an elderly man. That is the set-up in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus (206BC), Molière’s L’École des femmes (1662) and Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Seville (1775). In Musset, the judge Claudio has married the teenaged Marianne directly after her leaving the convent. Marianne is used to the strictures of the convent and knows no other man, so she has no notion of how other women live of what life could be.

She leaves Claudio’s house only to attend mass, and it is on one of these excursions that the young man Coelio has seen her and has fallen hopelessly in love with her. Coelio has serenaded Marianne under her window (this being Naples), he has written her a letter which she has either torn up or returns and has used an intermediary, an elderly woman Ciuta, to delay Marianne on her way to for from church to tell her of his feelings. Nothing has worked and Coelio is in despair believing that if Marianne does not return his love he will die.

So far Musset’s play follows the pattern of traditional comedy exactly. When Ciuta does not succeed, Coelio tells his woe to his best friend Octave only to find that Octave is Marianne’s cousin and therefore has access to the house and to her. We could say that in Octave, Coelio has found his Palaestrio (as in Plautus) or his Figaro (as in Beaumarchais), except that Octave is a libertine, known for his licentious life and love of drink. He may be able to gain access to see his cousin, but he fears he is not the best person to plead Coelio’s case.

In a major shift away from the comic pattern, Marianne upholds her husband’s ban on seeing any visitors. Over time, she relents and eventually she begins to seek Octave out. Octave believes that his pleading for Coelio is finally having an effect. Too late, however, he discovers that Marianne is falling in love with him, not with Coelio.

Director Philippe Calvario, who plays Octave, has assembled an excellent cast. It may be no surprise that he has reserved the best role for himself since it is Octave who has the most stage time and whose life undergoes the greatest change. Calvario’s Octave starts out as a dissolute rake, affecting trendiness in Aurore Popineau’s vaguely 1920 design with a tiger print jacket, leather pants and glittered eye shadow. At first, Octave thinks Coelio is rather a fool for being so obsessed with one woman since to him all women are alike. Gradually, though, Octave senses how desperate Coelio is, and Marianne’s initial rejection of Octave only challenges Octave to win Marianne over to Coelio’s cause. The difficulty of the challenge and the precarity of Coelio’s mental state do take their toll on Octave as he begins to drink even more than usual.

As he begins to learn from his experience with Marianne that all women are not alike, Octave begins to moderate the outrageousness of his style and his behaviour. In fact, his experience of the sad fate that Coelio meets so sobers him that he vows to renounce pleasure entirely. Calvario makes Octave’s final speech to Marianne ring with a combination of anger, bitterness, sadness and resignation the likes of which we could never have imagined when we first met him.

Marianne herself, as played by Zoé Adjani, is very different from the typical ingenue. Adjani shows Marianne so militant in defence of her husband’s strictures we wonder how Octave will find any means to make her listen to him. As we see, however, if Claudio is the first man she has ever known, Octave is the second and he is so completely different from the rigid Claudio that she begins to see that all men are not like her husband. Gradually we notice that Marianne allows Octave to stay for longer periods when he visits and even detains him when he wishes to go. Though Octave’s conversation is entirely about Coelio, Adjani shows that Marianne can’t help not admiring someone who is so faithful to his friend.

Marianne’s break from her husband comes when Claudio forbids Marianne ever to see Octave again, Marianne is justly outraged that her husband should deny her seeing one of her own relations. At this point all of the fury and rebellion we assume that Marianne has repressed until this point, Adjani lets loose in an epic tantrum of screams and wild gestures that leave furniture and books strewn across the floor. Marianne’s reaction is so intense not because of Coelio but because of Octave and is a rage against being forbidden to see the man she loves. Though silent, Adjani makes us feel Marianne’s devastation at the end when Octave tells her he does not love her and never has done.

Mikael Mittelstadt and Pierre Hurel alternate in the role of Coelio, and I happened to have seen Hurel. From his first entrance clad all in black, with sunken eyes and wearing a distracted look, you might well think he was about to play Hamlet. In fact, Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s sudden appearance in her room popped into my head as soon as I saw Hurel. As Hurel plays it, Coelio is on the verge of madness and his talk of suicide is no frivolous matter. Hurel has Coelio appear to decline in physical and mental health each new time we see him. Coelio’s only rise in mood comes when Octave tells him that Marianne has agreed to see him.

Except for loving a captive maiden from a distance, Coelio is decidedly unlike the typical male lover in comedy. We, like Octave, begin to wonder whether Coelio’s intense suffering from Marianne’s indifference is more a sign of mental illness than real love, especially since Marianne never sees him at any time in the play. Indeed, as Octave says of Coelio, “Il savait combien les illusions sont trompeuses, et il préférait ses illusions à la réalité”.

The precursor to Coelio’s hopeless love for a married woman is, of course, Goethe’s Werther in Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), that swept Europe and encouraged young men to suicide in its wake. Werther remain long in the public’s consciousness and became the basis for Massenet’s opera of the same name in 1892. Coelio’s odd forename derives from the Greek κοῖλος meaning “hollow”, as if Coelio lacks life or love to make him whole.

Musset pushes the role of the watchful guardian derived from comedy to an extreme in Claudio, played as a frightening petty tyrant by Christof Veillon. What makes Claudio particularly dangerous is that Musset has him represent both the law and lawlessness at once. Claudio is a judge, but he also uses hired assassins to guard his house to kill anyone they think may be trying to visit Marianne.

Calvario has Delphine Rich play both Coelio’s first go-between, Ciuta, and Hermia, Coelio’s mother. He also merges the role of Ciuta with that of the Tavern-Keeper which makes the small world of the play feel even smaller. Rich could not be more different in her two roles. As Ciuta, she is dressed as a type of gypsy fortune-teller and uses broad gestures and wide comic swoops of intonation. As Hermia, dressed in an elegant white gown, she is restrained in both gesture and speech. Hermia’s single scene involves her telling Coelio quite movingly about a man she knew who died for love. Though we do not realize how it foreshadows the conclusion as she tells it, in Hermia’s story she plays a role very similar to that of Marianne, while her now deceased husband had a role much like that of Octave. The man who died of love was the man who had employed Coelio’s father as a go-between.

As is fitting for an unhappy tale, lighting designer Christian Pinaud has kept the lighting levels very low so that we see actors primarily in isolated beams of light. The set of designer Roland Fontaine consists of two parts which can be moved into various configurations to suggest interior and exterior locations. It is not as ingeniously conceived as it should be and only looks like a real room when it represents Hermia’s parlour.

Plays by Musset have been staged in Ontario, old-timers still consider themselves lucky to have seen Jean Gascon’s production of Musset’s history play Lorenzaccio (1834) for the Stratford Festival in 1972 that toured to Minneapolis and Ottawa. Théâtre français de Toronto staged a double bill of Musset’s Un Caprice (1837) and Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermé (1845) in 2000. Musset’s notion that a comedy structure can lead as easily to tragedy as comedy derives from his general criticism of a world where idealism is ignored and falsehood appears to reign over truth. That may be why Les Caprices de Marianne seems like such a modern play in 2025.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Zoé Adjani as Marianne; Philippe Calvario as Octave and Mikael Mittelstadt as Coelio; Philippe Calvario as Octave and Zoé Adjani as Marianne. © 2025 Ludovic Leleu.

For tickets visit: www.theatredesgemeauxparisiens.com.