FROM 1 SEPTEBMBER 2017

A mother always knows when something is wrong.

When Florence hears that her husband Georges has beaten their son at tennis, she immediately conducts an investigation. She invites her son and daughter-in-law over for the evening to try to piece together the puzzle. The soirée descends into hilarious chaos, as Florence’s search for the truth results in jaw-dropping revelations from all of them.

Acute and funny, CONFIDENCES is a play about long-term love and marriage, for better, for worse.

CONFIDENCES (original title COMEDY OF LIES), a comedy of sex, love and secrets, was a triumph on Broadway.

NOTE FROM THE ADAPTOR

This is the eternal comedy of truth. In a family, the same as in a couple, everyone wears a mask but wants to know the truth; but as soon as they know the truth, they can’t cope with it! What should we do with the truth? Is happiness possible in a world of total transparency? Aren’t clever little lies what we need to maintain daily happiness? Joe Di Pietro’s play enjoyed enormous and long-running success on Broadway, and it caused a sensation in the US, where sincerity is worshiped and fabrication castigated, according to a Puritanical tradition. Likeable characters (a subtle, loquacious mother, a naïve, honest father, a virile, bumbling son and a daughter-in-law so absorbed by her baby she forgets she’s a woman) demonstrate the compromises of the heart and of reality. Although love and wisdom (or the wisdom of love) ultimately win the day, side-splitting scenes where bad faith goes head to head with excess are wonderfully entertaining. Confidences is a transgenerational comedy full of brilliance and noise about the importance of silence.

Eric-Emmanuel SCHMITT

A comedy by Joe DI PIETRO
Adapted by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Directed by Jean-Luc MOREAU
Starring Marie Christine BARRAULT, Alain DOUTEY, Arthur FENWICK and Claudia DIMIER

FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 2017, Tuesday to Saturday at 9pm, Sunday matinée at 3pm

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, JOE DI PIETRO

Joe Di Pietro was born in 1961 in New Jersey, USA. A writer, playwright, composer and songwriter, he began his career in the 1990s. He had his first success with the musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, which he wrote with the composer Jimmy Roberts and which ran for 12 years, enjoying over 5,000 performances before being adapted for the French-speaking world (Je t’aime, tu es parfait … change !) and performed in Paris at the Vingtième Théâtre in 2013. From 2005, Di Pietro’s works were already being staged in the major theatres on Broadway. He has been nominated and has won several awards for, among other works, the musicals Memphis (two Tony Awards in 2010, including Best Original Score) and Nice Work If You Can Get It, featuring music from George Gershwin’s musical and starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara, for which he won the Drama Desk Award for the book of the musical in 2012. As well as producing musicals, a genre that is close to his heart, he writes plays and comedies, such as Creating Claire, The Last Romance and Clever Little Lies, the original title of Confidences, which ran on Broadway from 2013 to 2015. His most recent production, a musical titled Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, premiered in New York in spring 2017.

NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

Joe Di Pietro’s play Clever Little Lies, now titled Confidences in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s elegant and sparkling adaptation, is the story of a wreckage: the wreckage of a family.
It’s a wreckage that hinges on a confession when a whispered confidence ignites a tinder-dry situation and upsets the precious but precarious balance of the relationships between couples and between parents and children.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s French adaptation of the original American play, provided me with a dialogue that combines humour and gravity allowing the play to unfold and, at the same time, preserving the basic plot. The art of suspense serves the cause of comedy. The characters belong to us: they could be you and me, right now!
Directing a play means bringing out all that is most desperate, painful and dangerous about the situations.
As the masks of tragedy and comedy so powerfully symbolise, you’ve got to juggle with that delicate borderline that topples tragedy into comedy.

Jean-Luc MOREAU