This article comes from Figaro Magazine

Kad Merad invents a new human type: the great one of Spain next door. Not sure that Victor Hugo imagined this cool and friendly Don César, a sort of thunderous homeless person, jovial anti-system, walking from the stage to the orchestra with empty supermarket bags in his hands. But what would be the point of the time that passed between Victor Hugo and today, if we could not take advantage of it to free ourselves from his text?

Jacques Weber is more classic: he performs the well-rehearsed act of the parchment humanist sacrificing himself to play a bastard character – Don Salluste – in order to serve his author – Hugo – who is nothing but justice, generosity, light and progress, as indicated in the “note of intent”, a pontificating zest, which he provides to the public. When Salluste-Weber becomes audible, which takes about ten minutes, one begins to think that if he were playing Molière’s Dom Juan it wouldn’t be very different. He puts his game on autopilot, and brings his character to the right place, without making waves.

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Jacques Weber’s direction, which claims to break the codes, only puts on conventional, archetypal audacity. It’s not with bellboys, hotel racks on wheels, men in black, little dance routines and too-short English suits that we’re going to get there. With Hugo, the exercise of directing is very difficult, because you have to find a formula which is somewhere between setting Shakespeare and turning a Feydeau. Where is the synthesis between drama and vaudeville? This is the question, left unanswered here, where the printing of jumble and the stacking of gadgets clutter rather than serve the text.

Without being completely dismayed, we are not convinced by the two headliners. But we end up forgiving them everything since they recruited Stéphane Caillard, who walks through the room like the Queen of Spain she plays, in a way that would make you become a monarchist, if you weren’t already. Magnitude, finesse, passion: under her red wings, she brings Ruy Blas, earthworm and imposter, to the firmament. She is at the same time feminist, perched princess, incandescent mistress, religious and lover. She is the woman of the 19th century, who takes off after the years of revolutionary machismo. We levitate when she plays, we come down when it’s no longer hers. Total: another play dominated, and saved, by a powerful woman.

Ruy Blas, after Victor Hugo, directed by Jacques Weber with himself, Kad Merad, Stéphane Caillard…, Théâtre Marigny (Paris 8th), until December 29.