The director, at the helm of the Théâtre du Rond-Point since 2001, hands over to Laurence de Magalhaes and Stéphane Ricordel.
“I would have continued, but I was asked to hand over”: at the age of 76, Jean-Michel Ribes will leave at the end of the year the controls of the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, which he made in two decades a high place of impertinence.
Appointed in 2001, this playwright, director and filmmaker, known in particular to the general public for the humorous series “Merci Bernard!” and “Palace”, undertook to transform the Théâtre du Rond-Point into a place of creation dedicated to contemporary authors and in particular to “laughter of resistance”.
“It’s the most beautiful story of my life!”
Twenty years later, this theater located at the bottom of the avenue des Champs-Elysées, offering some 700 performances on three stages each year in front of nearly 170,000 spectators, has become a teeming cultural place, with bookshop and restaurant.
“It’s the most beautiful story of my life! I lived twenty years of freedom at the Rond-Point”, confides to AFP Jean-Michel Ribes, “libertarian since always”. “The chance was that our desires met the desire of the public”.
“The laughter of resistance is a weapon to fight against all fundamentalisms”, estimates Mr. Ribes who has programmed often caustic authors, from Roland Topor to Christophe Alévêque, via Roland Dubillard or Patrick Timsit.
“I was honored to be the target of all fundamentalists, including traditionalist Catholics,” he says.
“A laugh that opens us up”
In 2015, Jean-Michel Ribes won a lawsuit for “incitement to hatred” brought by the General Alliance for the Respect of Christian Identity, which accused him of having programmed a play by the Hispano-Argentinian playwright Rodrigo Garcia, presenting the Last Supper as the last meal of humanity.
“I am against the tyranny of definitive morality. The laughter of resistance is a laughter that opens us up”, notes Mr. Ribes, who received the 2002 Molière award for best comic show for “Théâtre sans Animaux”, a series of sketches “against the morose confinement of measurement”.
Jean-Michel Ribes also made the Rond-Point a place of civic protest, by organizing numerous round tables.
In 2013, he invited the world of culture to mobilize “against hatred” after racist insults against the Keeper of the Seals Christiane Taubira. The same year, a big evening to defend “marriage for all” was organized with Pierre Bergé.
“In twenty years at the Rond-Point, none of the Ministers of Culture, nor the mayors of Paris, reproached me. If that had been the case, I would have returned the keys in a second”, still notes Jean-Michel Ribes.
“Our greatest pride is to have managed to offer the public what they did not yet know they liked”, summarized Jean-Michel Ribes a few days ago, during his farewell speech: “laughter of resistance in the fist and secularism in the heart”.
“I have confidence in my two successors to maintain the DNA of the Rond-Point”, confides Mr. Ribes, replaced by a duo formed by Laurence de Magalhaes and Stéphane Ricordel (Monfort Théâtre).
He does not intend to retire: “I am getting back into the authors’ market!”.