THE WINTER'S TALE

text William Shakespeare

translation Bernard-Marie Koltès

Ed. Les éditions de Minuit

direction and set design Sylvain Levitte

associate director Clara Noël

lightning design Juliette Besançon

costume design Sylvette Dequest

sound design Olivier Renet

company stage manager & lighting Matthieu Marques Duarte or Grégoire Montjoye

sound technician Matthieu Fuentes

set technician Kayla Krog

starring

Mariana Araoz

Simon Bakhouche

Yejin Choi

Alex Lawther

Paul Lofferon

Laurence Mayor

and a child from Maîtrise des Hauts de Seine

Running time 1h50

All audiences

production LES CHOSES ONT LEURS SECRETS

coproductions Scène Nationale 61 - Alençon, le Conseil Départemental de l’Eure, la Région Normandie et le ministère de la Culture (DRAC Normandie)

support Scène Nationale 61 - Alençon, le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, la Maîtrise des Hauts de Seine, L'Etable-compagnie des Petits champs, Lilas-en-Scène, la SPEDIDAM

Sylvain Levitte's radical version reimagines the story from the point of view of the murderer.

Who better than Shakespeare knows how to paint the human and his irrepressible desires?

THE WINTER'S TALE is a story of what happens when the thin line between truth and our perception of the world is dissolved; when a man, a king, cofounds his imagination with reality.

Leontes, eaten by jealousy, accuses his wife Hermione of carrying the son of his best friend, Polixenes. She gives birth to a little girl whilst Polixenes flees home to Bohemia -- where 16 years later his son will fall in love with Hermione's bastard child. Comedy and tragedy are interwoven in each breath in Shakespeare's second-to-last play.

The third installment of Levitte's Elizabethan triptych (following KING LEAR and TWELFTH NIGHT). In the footsteps of Peter Brook, whom Levitte assisted since 2020, the stage is almost empty, placing the actor and the text of Shakespeare at the heart of the work on stage. In THE WINTER'S TALE Levitte takes us into the troubled mind of Leontes, his fantasies and visions, and there we accompany him from murderous folly to bittersweet redemption.