Musset’s "On ne badine pas avec l’amour" at Théo Théâtre, staged by two actresses

At the Théo Théâtre, Christine Blondel and Magalie Ducleux perform Alfred de Musset’s "On ne badine pas avec l’amour," a comic and dramatic fable about sincerity in love. Musset wrote the play at 24, shaped by his turbulent affair with George Sand during their trip to Venice. A letter Sand sent him in May 1834 contains words later given almost verbatim to Perdican, the brilliant young law graduate whom his father intends to marry to his cousin Camille, newly out of the convent. The play was not written for performance; it reached the stage only in 1861, four years after the author’s death, with passages deemed immoral for the era removed. Blondel, with an androgynous silhouette and boyish haircut, narrates the cousins’ reunion after ten years apart, then becomes Perdican; Ducleux plays Camille, sensual in a heavy blue cotton dress, declaring "Je veux aimer, mais je ne veux pas souffrir." The production turns the servant Rosette into a life-size rag doll, a tragic collateral victim. Lights sculpt faces and the nursery rhyme "À la Claire Fontaine" recurs. Hélène Kuttner signed the review.