Le Cid

The many twists and turns that have made Chimène famous down the centuries begin with a blow: out of jealousy, Count Don Gomès (Chimène's father) slaps old Don Diègue (Don Rodrigue's father), and it's the latter's son who takes charge of the duel in which he orphaned the woman he was to have married. Chimène never ceases to ask the King for reparation, repressing her feelings, while the Infanta tries to conceal her own love for Rodrigue, which her rank requires her to sacrifice.
From his 2006 staging of Cyrano de Bergerac to his most recent Salle Richelieu productions, Lucrèce Borgia and Les Fourberies de Scapin, Denis Podalydès invites the Troupe to bring the repertoire to life in creations of both pictorial and embodied beauty. This season, he chooses Corneille's Le Cid, and looks back on the value given to "character", to the test of the code of honor, in this play set in 11th-century Spain: "The Cornelian character, man or woman, is in love, and his love goes against this code, breaks against it. A powerful contradiction tears him apart, divides him internally, ravages him. But he accedes to a form of consciousness that makes him detach himself from the common: this existential doubt makes him suffer so much that it transforms him, burns him, illuminates and darkens him all at once, makes him come into his own in his own eyes, in the eyes of the group, in the eyes of the audience."