After the death of its king Michel Bouquet in April and two years of slump due to the Covid, the French theater celebrates its party during the Molières ceremony on Monday evening May 30, despite a controversy with the collective against sexual violence
Stars like Isabelle Huppert, Vanessa Paradis, Lætitia Casta, Pierre Arditi, Jacques Weber or the director Ariane Mnouchkine are among the nominees for this 33rd edition. It was renamed “400th Molières Ceremony” to mark the 400th anniversary of the author of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
“We want it to be joy and a party. We were very dejected for two years because we couldn’t do our job, now the public is coming back, we are being reborn, we are happy,” said Jean-Marc Dumontet, producer at the head of several theaters. Parisians and president of the Molières.
This celebration was however preceded by a controversy with the collective
For his part, Jean-Marc Dumontet rejects the charge of censorship, stressing that it was the Molières who had initially invited the collective to come and express themselves. But according to him, the proposed text did not correspond to the agreement reached between the two parties. Under this agreement, this speech was to “avoid the evocation of particular cases”, he explained. In addition, it was to be “centered around a proposal”, namely “the establishment of a referent on sexual assault in each theater or company”.
Transmitted “very late” to the organizers, the text of the collective “did not bring proposals”, approached “a personal example” and “denounced the presence of rapists in the room, which is a totally gratuitous assertion”, continued Jean-Marc Dumontet. Following these declarations, Marie Coquille-Chambel affirmed on Twitter that “contrary to what Jean-Marc Dumontet, the director of Molières, explains, everyone can read it, we are not saying at any time that there are rapists in the room but people accused of rape.”
According to the director of Molières, Marie Coquille-Chambel did not respond to reminders from the organization during the day on Saturday May 28, and “preferred to express herself on her social networks in the evening”. For her part, the latter castigated “the gagging of feminist activists”, in a blog post posted on Saturday evening 28. “No one will dictate the tone or content of our speech. It is for this reason that we have decided not to be present at the Molières”, she argued, reproducing the text at the center of the dispute.
After the cancellation of this intervention, Jean-Marc Dumontet indicated that he intended to schedule a speech on the creation, in theaters, of a position of referent on sexual assault, an idea that he considers “excellent” .
Beyond this controversy, the boss of Molières promises “a strong tribute to Michel Bouquet”. This tutelary figure of French theater and cinema, who had played no less than 800 times The King is Dying by Ionesco, died on April 13 at the age of 96, and was entitled to a national tribute to the Invalides.
