Organized without an audience in 2020 then completely canceled last year because of the Covid-19, the Molières will be broadcast on France 3 from 9:10 p.m., from the Folies Bergère in Paris. The evening will be hosted by comedian Alex Vizorek.
Stars like Isabelle Huppert, Vanessa Paradis, Laetitia Casta, Pierre Arditi, Jacques Weber or the director Ariane Mnouchkine are among the nominees for this 33rd edition. It was renamed “400th ceremony of Molières” to mark the 400th anniversary of the author of the “Bourgeois gentleman”.
“We want it to be joy and a party. We were very dejected for two years because we couldn’t do our job, now the public is coming back, we are being reborn, we are happy”, a declared to AFP Jean-Marc Dumontet, producer at the head of several Parisian theaters and president of Molières.
This celebration was however preceded by a controversy with the collective
At the origin of this movement, blogger Marie Coquille-Chambel accused the management of Molières on Saturday of having “censored” the text that she and another activist should have read on stage. The collective called for a protest rally Monday at 7:30 p.m. in front of the Folies Bergère.
For his part, Mr. Dumontet rejects the charge of censorship, stressing that it was the Molières who had initially invited the collective to come and express themselves.
But according to him, the proposed text did not correspond to the agreement reached between the two parties.
– Tribute to the “king” –
Under this agreement, this speech was to “avoid the evocation of particular cases”, he explained. In addition, it had to be “centered around a proposal”, namely “the establishment of a referent on sexual assault in each theater or company”.
Transmitted “very late” to the organizers, the text of the collective “did not bring proposals”, approached “a personal example” and “denounced the presence of rapists in the room, which is a totally gratuitous assertion”, continued Mr Dumontet.
According to him, Marie Coquille-Chambel did not respond to reminders from the organization during the day on Saturday, and “preferred to express herself on her social networks in the evening”.
For her part, the latter castigated “the gagging of feminist activists”, in a blog post posted on Saturday evening.
“No one will dictate the tone or content of our speech to us. It is for this reason that we have decided not to be present at the Molières”, she argued, reproducing the text at the center of the dispute.
After the cancellation of this intervention, Mr. Dumontet indicated that he intended to schedule a speech on the creation, in theaters, of a position of referent on sexual assault, an idea which he considers “excellent”.
Beyond this controversy, the boss of Molières promises “a strong tribute to Michel Bouquet”.
This tutelary figure of French theater and cinema, who had played no less than 800 times “The king is dying” by Ionesco, died on April 13 at the age of 96, and was entitled to a national tribute to the Invalides.
