Création française : Cour d’honneur du Château de Chambord, le 30 août 2001 Reprise 2001/2002 : Royal Opera House de Covent Garden, Londres (Angleterre), Château de Blois, Banqueting House/Whitehall Palace, Londres (Angleterre), Grand Théâtre de Reims
Comédie-ballet de 1670, en cinq actes, de Molière et Lully réalisée en coproduction avec l’English Bach Festival
Musique : Jean-Baptiste Lully
Texte : Molière adapté par Alain Germain
Mise en scène : Alain Germain
Chorégraphie : Stephen Preston
Décors et costumes : choisis par Alain Germain dans les fonds de costumes de l’Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing et de l’English Bach Festival
Lumières : Roger Frith
Distribution : Yves Aubert, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, Marianne Borgo, Steven Boydall, Graeme Broadbent, Florence Daguerre, Rodrigo Del Pozzo, Philippe Giraudeau, Yves Gourvil, Jeremy Huw Williams, Liz Lea, René Linnebank, Nicholas Mead, Agustin Prunell Friend, Lorena Randi et Jochem van Ast
Ballet, Chœurs et Orchestre de l’English Bach Festival sous la direction de Jean-Claude Malgoire
Distribution : Patrick Albenque/Philippe Rondest, Yves Aubert, Marianne Borgo, Cerise/Virginie Méry, Tobias Cole, Philipp Conway-Brown/Jean-Félix Callens, Stephen Garner/Joao Fernandes, Yves Gourvil, Jeremy Huw-Williams/Andrew Mayor, Andreas Jäggi, Gareth Jones, Anne Le Fol, René Linnebank, Ludmila Marchadier, Nicholas Mead/Olivier Galfione, Ian Mowat et Jochem van Ast,
Ballet, Chœurs et Orchestre de l’English Bach Festival sous la direction de Nicholas Cleobury/Christian Curnyn
« Comedy of no errors. The performance worked well at any level. Director Alain Germain cleverly shortened the play to 80 minutes, giving the music just enough context. It was quite brilliantly delivered. Yves Gourvil (Mr.Jourdain) is one of those French actors with india-rubber features who is irresistibly funny before he has even opened his mouth, and doubly so when he has. He met his match in Marianne Borgo as his shrewish wife, and was surrounded by an expert troupe whose division in the programme into actors, singers and dancers was otiose : you could scarcely tell which were which, and that is as it should be. Philippe Giraudeau (Dancing Master), Yves Aubert (Philosopher) and Graeme Broadbent (Mufti) deserve special mention. Stephen Preston’s choreography was properly elegant without ever descending to mere preciousness. Perhaps the most startling, not to say subversive, element of the performance at a time when people maintain that you can’t deliver dialogue in big theatres without amplification, was the unaided clarity of the spoken text. Every wittily inflected line came pinging oud loud and clear – and the audience fell about laughing at Molière’s jokes. »
Rodney Milnes . The Times