Le Sabre de mon père
Le Sabre de mon père (my father's sabre) is a theatre play by Roger Vitrac premiered at Théâtre de Paris in 1951. The play was not really a success at this time. Roger Vitrac was very ill when the critics were published and they remained very bad. The play, a surrealist artwork, disappointed a lot of critics even among the most receptive to that genre. The title was not enough explicit for some of them.
Original cast
- Mise-en-scène : Pierre Dux
- Settings : Félix Labisse
- Costumes : Rosine Delamare
- Roles and interpreters :
- Françoise Dujardin : Sophie Desmarets
- Édouard Dujardin : Pierre Dux
- Pierre Martignac : Max Palenc
- Adélaïde Poinsot : Claire Gérard
- Boussu : Noël Roquevert
- Albert Feuillade : Jean Lagache
- Docteur Laborderie : Charles Dechamps
- Nini : Anne Vitrac
- Clémence : Luce Clament
- Simon : Serge Lecointe
- Flore Médard : Marcelle Arnold
- Diane Condé : Geneviève Berney
- Popaul : Jean-Jacques Duverger
- Isabelle Laborderie : Janine Liezer
- Pierril: René Génin
Critics
The play, however, was defended by Jean Anouilh : "We are some in the art who have been working since the last war to strangle the anecdote, to kill the idea of a good play that ruled the French theater [...] to the point of reducing it to the status of a mummy. [...] The play is good, no? Well, no. Neither Colombe nor Le Sabre are good plays. But if the actors play "like gods", it's because they have characters otherwise they don't play well. [...] And then, let architecture to the construction specialists. The theater is a game of the mind and mind may well make honey in foraging in detail, like a bee." This critic echoes Robert Kemp's article : "That Sabre, good in details and which, taken line by line, do not lack of taste but is on the whole after all insignificant ... "