Macbett (re-creation)

After the creations Don Quixote in 2016, Hamlet in 2018 and Pinocchio in 2020, La Montagne cachée, which was created in 2023 at the Maison des Arts de Créteil, has closed a cycle of research on an hyper-theatricality in contact with reality, which called all the technical tools of creation, from the most artisanal (painted cardboard) to the most sophisticated (multicam device with control panel). Today, within the company, we collectively feel the need for a break that involves a thorough review of our practices.

With the re-creation of Macbett by Ionesco, it is for us to return to our fundamentals, to a raw theatre, a theatre of text and actors, whose spectacular dimension rests on the strength of the verb, the enthusiasm of the actors and their assertive choices in directing and directing. In 2005, Macbett by Ionesco was the very first project to create the Dramaticules. This work was part of the company’s DNA in its relationship to the public, humour, cruelty and freedom.

Ionesco’s Macbett is not the reassuring caricature of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays but a critical operation on myth, an attempt to weld Elizabethan theatre with today’s theatre. Ionesco follows the Shakespearean narrative quite closely and at the same time seeks new theatrical paths. Macbett/Macbeth’s experience is universal: an external success cannot prevent an internal defeat. But Ionesco marks its territory: he tells us the extraordinary destinies of interchangeable and unremarkable people. In modern times, there are no heroes and everything goes too fast. Macbett is an anti-hero and his tragedy is a farce.

In 2005, the media space was occupied by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then Minister of Interior and would inexorably access the highest positions of the state. The porosity between news and the coin was located – quite despite us – in this place. For many spectators, Macbett was Nicolas Sarkozy and Duncan: Jacques Chirac. Today, in the moment of change that our world – and our sector – is going through, with wars and conflicts that have never been so close and so threatening, recreating Macbett de Ionesco is more necessary, more urgent, more salutary.

Our Macbett is a game project; the play calls with all its forces a theatre of unreasonable actors, between fervour and casualness. La Compagnie des Dramaticules, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2022, brings together a team of actors and technicians, the same from one show to another. Each creation, “tailor-made” for the troupe, is not just the “result” of a year and a half of preparation and two months of rehearsals. It is the fruit of a collective adventure begun with Macbett de Ionesco in 2005, an adventure that sees each of its protagonists continue to want to surprise themselves, to surpass themselves, to love each other. 20 years later, we are still artisans. For us, recreating Macbett is about reinventing ourselves, regenerating ourselves. This new creation reflects the urgency we feel to celebrate theatricality in its purest expression – that of a grand theatre of tripods that tells the world of today with force and derision.

Ionesco’s refusal to give any form to this piece, the journey he proposes in theatricality, the changes of registers (from classical tragedy to vaudeville and fairy tale) provide an exciting playground for questioning the strength of theatre and its ability to tell – to all – the complexity of the world.

Jérémie Le Louët