Theatre: The Abolition of Privilege

Alone on stage, in an impressive performance, Maxime Pambet plays a multitude of characters from the nobility, the clergy and the third estate, symbolised by the audience surrounding the stage, who find themselves de facto participants in these rhetorical jousts that made history.
To reflect. And to thrill collectively.

It is the summer of 1789. These young deputies arrive from their provinces, summoned to the Estates General in Versailles. France is then a chronically deficit-ridden state, where the richest escape taxation. It is also a regime on its last legs and a people at their wits' end, demanding justice and seeing nothing coming. Until, in one night, in Versailles, everything changed. The famous night of 4 August!
But this play also deals with the months leading up to that famous night, when failed reforms and famines were accumulating. And the weeks that followed, when the decree had to be implemented...

Adapted from Bertrand Guillot's ‘political adventure novel’ L'Abolition des privilèges, this show by Hugues Duchêne paints a colourful and informative picture of this key episode in the Revolution. By adding a short interlude with deliberate anachronisms, the director echoes the current global political situation, questioning us about what we should give up today in terms of certain privileges, like a 21st-century version of the night of 4 August...
The result is a work of precise historical scholarship, thought-provoking relevance and devilish humour, accessible to all, regardless of class!

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