Vitez metteur en scène de Hugo

After Jean Vilar, Antoine Vitez, is the twentieth-century producer who has contributed most to the rediscovery of Hugo's theater. This article considers his stage productions of The Burgraves (Ivry, 1977), Hernani and Lucretia Borgia (Chaillot, 1985), focusing on the symbolism of the decor (dizzying stairs, giant hands) which are at once signifying fields of play and polysemous metaphors (of social ascension, decline of aristocratie values, desire, as well as ubiquity, omnipotence or fragility of power), and analyzing the complexity of the actantial model brought to light by Vitez in his casting and directing of actors in Hernani, where the figure of the hero is destabilized by the unexpected height of child-king Don Carlos. Vitez realizes a kind of theater which is non-melodramatic and non-Manichean, displaying the plurality of the characters' desires, their internal conflicts, seen through the prism of a theater as if in a dream.