Princeton students will read, in English world premiere, French leading dramatist Michel Vinaver’s most recent play, Bettencourt Boulevard – A Story of France (L’Arche Editeurs, 2014). Translated/directed by director, playwright and actress Gabriella Maione, the play revisits the famed Bettencourt Affair around L’Oréal heiress, raising questions on the troubled times of France’s contemporary history.
The play is drawn from one of the most scorching topical events, pulling in along the way the perennial components of legends and myths. The authors of Ancient Greece sometimes liked to let step in to put an end to their play a God or a Goddess. Regarding the affair named Bettencourt the irresolute ending is in the hands of the Justice’s apparatus coupled with the recourse of medical expertise.
What is at Michel Vinaver’s heart is the Affair’s present time, none less than its past, sinking its roots into the last hundred years of France’s history with all its repercussions: the intimate, the politics and the economics which mingle indissolubly.
The comical constantly showing through, the tragic as much, permeating every link in the chain of this incessantly fascinating saga; men and women who were in the press headlines, whom we heard on the radio or we watched on television, come on stage one after the other – somehow, as in the epoch of Shakespeare, when the dramatist beheld: all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely actors and spectators. On which border do we find ourselves?
Admission is free but reservations are strongly recommended by sending an email to ftw@princeton.edu Subject Line: Festival.