Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy
 
Musical direction: Jean-Luc Impe
 

The King's Menu Pleasures

The end of Louis XIV's reign was heavy, boring, formal and oh so heavy. The aging monarch never stopped wanting to die and pleasures seemed to have deserted the Court forever. The "great" no longer had the sole prerogative of entertainment. A new fringe of the population, still marginal, but growing, gained access to the world of the arts... and it would gain access through the power of finance.

The bourgeoisie, after having slavishly copied the aristocratic model, will soon impose its own values. It is this society in full mutation, but already entirely dominated by money, that the fairground theater depicts for us. If the latter is subversive; even if only in its fight to acquire the right to speak, at no time does it present itself as a committed spectacle.

Satire, burlesque, mockery and disrespect prove incompatible with a fierce desire to change society. The Fair notes, in order to laugh and make others laugh, the flaws and imperfections of the world around it.

Beyond the spirit of derision that characterizes it, the theater of Polichinelle develops a morality based on property. Enjoyment and possession are the two breasts of the Fair.

By judging the puppet and the fairground theatre as a whole unworthy of being included on its tablets, literary criticism has overlooked a theatrical corpus that parodied and satirized the certified representatives of official culture. Because they were not subject to any dramatic constraints such as respect for the three unities so dear to classical authors, because they were not pensioned by the King or by any random person, the Fairground performers got into the habit of deviating from a measured decorum. The break with convention allowed for unbridled diversity. Time and space would no longer be rigid constraints but extraordinary auxiliaries that would generate scenes close to surrealism. This distance from the clichés presented on official stages was also manifested in the choice of characters and themes that the official authors of Polichinelle decided to include in their plays.
The Fair drew its effectiveness from the clash of genres and codes. It would never mix the ingredients that contributed to its success; it would always prefer a juxtaposition, a frank opposition to a mixture devoid of its flavor. On the stage of Punchinello, the pompous acting of the Romans and the physical verve of the Italians clashed. The emphatic declamation of the former, their statism and the grandiloquence of their gestural rhetoric must have seemed singularly ridiculous compared to the irreverent comments of the disciples of our hunchback. Add to that the codes imposed by the vagaries of fairground history, the obligatory use of song for example, and you get a show that still has its own effectiveness today, beyond any consideration.

It is likely that this protean character of the theatres of the Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent fairs in the 18th century, which proceeds by the "centonisation" of the most heterogeneous elements, could have disconcerted lovers of well-defined categories. Like the Harlequin costume, it is made up of a multitude of elements, each more colourful than the last. Without ever mixing, they form a whole that lacks neither strength nor coherence.

...it is to this theatre that the Compagnie des Menus -Plaisirs du Roy has been attached for almost thirty years.