Les Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne

es Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne, the 19th-century manual of manners that inspired Jean-Luc Lagarce to write one of his last plays, was unanimously acclaimed last season, thanks to Catherine Hiegel's performance. In his text, Lagarce cheerfully plunders the pseudo-Baroness Staffe's work to reveal, under the guise of humor, the obscenity of rigid conventions and to denounce the customs of a world where women, maintained in dependence on men, are subject to their power. The play may have been written in 1994, but even though it addresses the bourgeois society of 1889, its grating echoes can be heard in the age of #MeToo. Catherine Hiegel transforms herself into a lecturer on the absurd, with her trademark whimsy and freedom of opinion, to tell the story of the madness of families, ceremonial and the established order.