A play we staged in college where I played the title role of a philandering Diderot. In a bathrobe.
Morality, thievery, Encyclopédie
âLibertinage is the faculty to separate sex from love, mates from mating, in a word, libertinage is all about nuance and accuracy.â This is what a philandering Diderot tells his wife, as he is constantly solicited and needs to write the EncyclopĂ©dieâs article about Morality.
Le Libertin is a play by French author Ăric-Emmanuel Schmitt (also adapted into a movie) that we staged with a group of friends from my college drama club back in 2006.
It was my first role in the main cast of a non-musical play. To make things more interesting, I played the lead role (Diderot) and had to play the whole thing naked under my bathrobe. The play actually opens with Diderot posing half-naked for a painting.
The story starts as Madame Therbouche is painting a nude of Diderot. The seance is interrupted when Diderot is asked, at the last minute, to write the article about Morality for the EncyclopĂ©die, because Rousseau suddenly canât.
The play opens as Madame Therbouche is working on a painting of Diderot.
Diderot finds that the topic isnât an easy one, especially when heâs seduced by Madame Therbouche, heâs solicited by the young DâHolbach as well (the daughter of his host), he suffers the wrath of his wife, heâs trying to parent his daughter AngĂ©lique, and he uncovers a plot to rob him.
The script is smart, incredibly funny and full of witty double entendres and innuendos. The situations are often comical, like when Diderot, confronted by the two women seducing him, claims he cannot choose between them because heâs stuck like Buridanâs ass.
Throughout the play, Diderot is solicited by both the young DâHolbach and Madame Therbouche.
Diderotâs very changing definition of Morality throughout the play is another source of amusement: it suits Diderot to prefer a liberal interpretation when heâs flirting, but he quickly falls back to conservative views when itâs his daughterâs virginity thatâs at stake.
Working on this play and performing it on stage was a lot of fun. We had almost no budget, so the set, props and costumes were recycled and improvised from previous plays and personal items. The comedy quickly spread to the cast, and we had a lot of laughs during rehearsals.
Diderot is seduced by Madame Therbouche, but she turns out to be more interested in his precious art.
The encyclopedia theme was a hint to my other main extracurricular activity at the time: my involvement in Wikipedia. But from a personal perspective, there were a lot of reasons for me not to play the lead role. For one, I didnât think I could learn and remember all the text, considering I was in almost every scene. It was also hard for me to imagine playing a womanizer, or knowing Iâd be half-naked on stage during the whole play.
But I decided to take up the challenge, knowing Iâd have to succeed because there was no turning back. In the end, I wasnât disappointed; the play got a lot of praise. I was really proud, and happy I had pushed myself to do it.
And right there, as the red curtain fell, I knew I could do anything I set out to do.
Le Libertin was written by Ăric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Photos were taken from the video recorded by the A/VÂ club.