Theatre - Adaptation of Le Côté de Guermantes at the Comédie-Française

Extract from the website of the Comédie-Française:

"The Narrator moves there with his family in Paris, into an apartment in the hôtel de Guermantes, whose salon he dreams of frequenting. The Guermantes own a château near Combray, where he has already been able to admire the Duchesse Oriane in a portrait, a figure that crystallises his fascination. Of this volume, the director explains that it is above all the embodiment of an aristocratic family name, unattainable and suddenly brought within reach of this young man endowed with an extraordinary power of seduction. At the time of mourning both childhood and romantic illusions, this book – whose action takes place partly around the Théâtre Marigny – is also a rare account of the bonds of friendship the Narrator forms with the Dreyfusard Saint-Loup. Christophe Honoré, who notably brought La Princesse de Clèves to the screen in La Belle Personne and recently staged his own Idoles, knows how much literature resists attempts at illustrative adaptation, but also how it comes alive when deployed in the present day. The madness of this work lies, in his view, in the sensation of finding in it something "absolutely close" to our own lives, a reader's upheaval, ever pressing, which he makes the vanishing point of his theatrical project.