Le Misanthrope - Eric Elmosnino - Tournée

Le Misanthrope at Radiant-Bellevue

At Radiant-Bellevue, we are delighted to welcome Le Misanthrope, carried by the presence and artistry of Eric Elmosnino, for a tour engagement that places one of the most incisive works of French theatre at the center of our season. Our stage is built for clarity of language and precision of gesture, and this production makes the most of those virtues: the verbal wit, the moral wrestling, and the sudden flashes of vulnerability all land with immediacy in the room. Audiences who return to Radiant-Bellevue for the finesse of our acoustics and the intimacy of our sightlines will find themselves immersed in a living conversation between actor and spectator. The timeless duel between sincerity and social performance has rarely felt more current than it does here, and the quality of the ensemble, anchored by Elmosnino’s rigor and mercurial energy, creates a performance that breathes beyond the footlights. We are proud to host a staging that honors classical verse while speaking directly to the questions that animate our public today.

Eric Elmosnino, presence and precision in a classic that never sleeps

As a venue devoted to the craft of performance, we are especially attentive to artists who refine their tools from project to project. Eric Elmosnino has long been celebrated for the delicacy of his choices and the way he curates silence as meaning; those qualities are luminous in Le Misanthrope. Known to many for the startling exactness of his screen portrayals and his agile passage between cinema and stage, he brings to Molière’s alexandrines a conversational ease that never sacrifices musicality. Where some readings play Alceste purely as a storm, Elmosnino shades fury with fatigue, integrity with desire, and judgment with self-knowledge, inviting the audience to recognize themselves not just in the target of his diatribes but in their stubbornness. Recent seasons have seen him pursue a vivid balance between contemporary writing and the classical canon, and that dual allegiance gives this tour its modern pulse: the social codes of Molière’s salons become a laboratory for our own dilemmas about truth-telling, loyalty, and public image. At Radiant-Bellevue, the architectural warmth of our hall—tight focus downstage, generous air above the apron—lets the play’s crosscurrents register cleanly: the sly humor lands, the quarrels bite, and the reconciliations remain provisional, as they should. Our audience will encounter not a museum piece but a sharp and compassionate investigation of what it costs to speak frankly.

Hosting this Tournée is also an opportunity to underline what our venue values in touring theatre: disciplined dramaturgy, detail you can hear from the back row, and stagecraft calibrated for travel without compromise. The production’s clean visual language—an uncluttered environment that highlights bodies, breath, and verse—aligns naturally with the proportions of Radiant-Bellevue, so that every movement reads and every rhetorical flourish keeps its tension. We are attentive to the rhythm of the evening: the pacing that allows laughter to crest without drowning the text, the quiet after an admission, the beat before a retort. Elmosnino’s partners onstage meet him in that rhythm, a company built on listening; their counterpoint sharpens his argument and exposes its limits, and the play’s famous set pieces gain freshness because they grow from real stakes rather than decorative virtuosity. For spectators who prize the grammar of live acting—breath, timing, gaze—this is a chance to see a leading interpreter work inside a classical frame with the freedom of contemporary sensibility. Radiant-Bellevue is ready to receive audiences who come curious, ready to laugh and to wince, and to test Molière’s mirror against themselves. The evening belongs to theatre that trusts the intelligence of its viewers and the vitality of its language—qualities we champion in our program, and which Le Misanthrope, with Eric Elmosnino at its center, embodies with bracing clarity.

Le Misanthrope - Eric Elmosnino - Tournée dans d'autres salles à Lyon