TNP: "The False Servant" subtly updated

This is an excellent opportunity to discover the work of this French actor and director (born in 1970), who has lived in Switzerland for eighteen years. Especially since it's with his version of Marivaux's La Fausse Suivante , an author he knows perfectly. Jean Liermier is indeed a devotee of the 18th-century French playwright.

Following a first encounter with Marivaux with La Double Inconstance in 1999 in Carouge, he staged Les Sincères at the Comédie-Française in 2007. A year later, when he took over the direction of the Carouge theatre, he made his debut with Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard . After more than ten years spent without his privileged interlocutor, Jean Liermier declares “having felt the desire to once again work with Marivaux, my universal contemporary”. He offers a subtle update of La Fausse Suivante.

Rudy Sabounghi's costumes leave a certain temporal uncertainty hanging in the air, evoking both the 1950s and the present day. The men wear suits and long coats, while the Countess (the comedy's central protagonist) wears a mid-length skirt, pearl necklace, and cashmere sweaters whose colors change throughout the scenes.

Three hundred years later, Marivaux's play has lost none of its comic flair. Nor its acuity in denouncing social hypocrisy through maneuvers, ruses, and various disguises. All this from a plot that could be imagined today: a rich man wants to marry a woman much richer and, above all, younger than the one he had initially set his sights on. But beware, Marivaux was a visionary: the desired young woman may well be a young man...

The False Servant – From June 5 to 14 at the TNP in Villeurbanne