First studying at the Ensatt – École de la Rue Blanche – then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique, where her teachers were Philippe Adrien, Bernard Dort, Mario Gonzalès, Jean-Christian Grinevald, Jack Garfein and Stuart Seide, Claire Lasne Darcueil worked as an actress with Lucien Melki, Marcel Bozonnet, Isabelle Janier, Marc Zammit, Anne Torrès, Jean-Paul Wenzel and Gilberte Tsaï… She then became a director and premiered five plays by the author Mohamed Rouabhi with whom she founded the company Les Acharnés. In 1992, it was Les Acharnés (The Relentless) then Les Fragments de Kaposi (1994), Ma petite vie de rien du tout (My Little Nothing Life, 1996), Jérémie Fischer (show for a young public, 1997) and Les Nouveaux Bâtisseurs (The New Builders, 1997). In 1996, she began to take an interest in the works of Anton Chekhov all of whose plays she decided to stage in order. She presented The Worthless Fellow Platonov, then in 1999 Ivanov 1942-1999 (associating François Truffaut with Anton Chekhov), The Wood Demon in 2002 and now The Seagull. Appointed co-director with the late Laurent Darcueil, of the Centre dramatique Poitou-Charentes in 1998, she refused to stage her works in a stationary venue; the Centre purchased a big-top. She organized with Vincent Gatel, as an interval between seasons, a Printemps chapiteau which had its eighth edition in 2007. Stopping in the smallest villages, sometimes including amateur actors, using small formats invented by the Centre's actors, this Printemps chapiteau fertilizes the entire region where Claire Lasne Darcueil does theatre.
Claire Lasne Darcueil presented, at the Festival d'Avignon, Dom Juan by Molière and The Wood Demon by Chekhov in 2002, and the big-top was set up in Rasteau with Princes et Princesses (Princes and Princesses) by Michel Ocelot and Joyeux anniversaire (Happy Birthday) in 2004. In 2006, she directed a cycle of readings of French texts there with Richard Sammut.
Claire Lasne Darcueil has taken a kind of parallel journey with the works of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Chronologically following the plays written by this absolute master of the Russian theatre (Platonov, Ivanov, The Wood Demon), she is now tackling The Seagull, the triumphal success of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, two years after its premiere in Saint Petersburg. An inexhaustible work that is fascinating because of the depth of the analyses, the many entangled themes, the tenderness with which each character is portrayed… Claire Lasne Darcueil has taken Chekhov's initial version, the one that takes the time to go to the very depth of the behaviours, introspection, pain, hopes and despair of the characters who are never judged by an author who seems to be present in each of them, and not only in the couple formed by the diametrically opposed writers, Trigorin and Treplev. Nina, an amorous innocent betrayed by the man she loves, a mother bearing the death of her child, an actress accepting the failure of her ambitions, becomes, in Claire Lasne Darcueil's staging, a being of astonishing modernity as she goes “alone” on the pursuit of a laborious existence, rejecting the powerlessness to live and the desperate irony that seem the common denominators of those who surround her. Staying extraordinarily close to Chekhov's words and rhythms, his silences, his repetitions, emotion that skims the surface, laughter that dies in the throat, the gentleness and lightness that conceal the anguish and despair that lurk about must be discovered. It is a contained approach, all subtlety and sincerity, that appears in this work characterized by extreme faithfulness and dazzling inventiveness, enveloped in original music composed by Alexandros Markeas.
Production
coproduction: Centre dramatique Poitou-Charentes, Ars Nova-Ensemble
Instrumental
Théâtre associé: Le Théâtre-Scène nationale de Poitiers
avec le soutien: de la Région Poitou-Charentes