Quartett by Heiner Müller, written in 1981, is a palimpsest of Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Choderos de Laclos, a legendary work from the Enlightenment, in which the Marquise de Merteuil and the Viscount Valmont, a wicked and libertine couple, use every available trick to destroy civilisation, including means that civilisation itself offers them. In the 1980s, Heiner Müller, who talked regularly with Jean Jourdheuil, his translator who smuggled his work to the West, confided in him that he would one day like to see the Marquise de Merteuil in Quartett played by Jeanne Moreau. This wish remained a secret until the day when Jean Jourdheuil, mentioned it during a programme on France Culture radio, when he was interviewed in a homage to Müller in 2006.
France Culture and the Avignon Festival decided to realise Heiner Müller's dream, and so suggested to Jeanne Moreau and Sami Frey, a public reading of this dizzying play, conceived as a continuous role-playing game, a strange masculine/feminine interchange, and to place it in the Pope's Palace Courtyard of Honour, where Jeanne Moreau appeared at the very beginning of her career, during the first Avignon Festival in 1947 with Jean Vilar, and more recently Sami Frey.
This reading, which will be broadcast live, will take place in the stage set designed by Philippe Marioge for L'Acte Inconnu (The Unknown Act), Valère Novarina's production which is not playing that evening.
Müller had indicated that the Courtyard of Honour should be imagined as “a sitting room before the revolution/a bunker after the Third World War”. France Culture and the Avignon Festival are pleased to be able to offer such an exceptional event to the audience on the 60th anniversary of the Festival.
At the Avignon Festival, in 1947 Jeanne Moreau played L'Histoire de Tobie et Sara (The Story of Tobie and Sara) by Paul Claudel, La Terrasse de Midi (The Noon Terrace) by Maurice Clavel and William Shakespeare's King Richard II in the Courtyard of Honour. In 1951 she played in Corneille's Le Cid, Prince Frederick of Homburg by Heinrich von Kleist and in 1952, Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset. In 1989, she played in La Célestine (The Celestine) by Fernando de Rojas.
Sami Frey has played in Le Borgne Est Roi (The One-eyed Man is King) by Carlos Fuentes in 1970. In 1988, he played in Je me souviens (I Remember) by Georges Perec and in Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the Courtyard of Honour in 1997.
Distribution
traduction: Jean Jourdheuil et Béatrice Perregaux
lu par: Jeanne Moreau et Sami Frey
lecture proposée par: Jean Jourdheuil
réalisation: Blandine Masson
Production
retransmission en direct sur France Culture
texte publié: aux éditions de Minuit