HASfter the high mass of French cinema with the Césars, comes that of the theater with the prestigious Molières ceremony, Monday, May 30. This annual meeting sheds light on the authors, actors and technicians of the stage performances that thrilled the spectators. Many are the personalities, sometimes also associations, to be invited on stage during the event for a speech, often philosophical or committed. A few hours before the start of the event, Monday May 30, franceinfo reveals tensions during the preparations. The speech of two members of the #MeTooThéâtre collective, who were to denounce live in front of millions of viewers the sexual and physical violence committed in the middle, has been cancelled.
“We prepared a text that we sent to them and I was called back to tell me that it was not going to be possible, that I had to rewrite something”, explains with notable bitterness Marie Coquille-Chambel, critic of theater and feminist activist within the collective, evoking the organizers of the event. “For us it was impossible to rewrite, to be censored, not to be able to have a free speech on violence”, continues the one who had broken the silence by filing a complaint against her former companion, an actor from the Comédie-Française . President of Molières, Jean-Marc Dumontet refutes these accusations of censorship.
The initial text would target supposed “rapists in the room”
Denying the reprobation, Jean-Marc Dumontet assures that the text prepared by the activists went beyond the agreement previously concluded between the two parties. “The text denounced the presence of rapists in the room”, which is akin to a “totally gratuitous aggression” for the president of Molières, while the speech was to deal with “the establishment of a referent on aggressions sex in every theater or company”. For her part, Marie Coquille-Chambel persists and signs: “We were told that our text did not correspond to the ceremony, in the sense that it is not festive. Should gender and sexual violence be exposed in a glamorous way? Deploring this “policed setting”, the #MeTooThéâtre collective called for a large gathering, in the early evening at the Folies Bergère, place of the ceremony.
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