With the death of Marcel Maréchal, which occurred today in his eighty-third year, the French theatre loses one of its major figures, he who was simultaneously actor, director, author and director of theatre.
Born in Lyon, he created, still a student, the Théâtre du Cothurne in 1958, which he quickly installed at the Théâtre des Marronniers. Here and at his side began many artists including Pierre and Catherine Arditi, Maurice Bénichou and Bernard Ballet. In 1968, he became director of the Théâtre du Huitième. Leaving Lyon for Marseille, he first directed the Théâtre du Gymnase before founding in 1981 the Théâtre de la Criée with François Bourgeat. In 1995, he became director of the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris and was appointed to the Tréteaux de France in 2001.
A remarkable actor, Marcel Maréchal had an undeniable talent as a popular animator of theatrical life. Throughout his career as a director and actor, he has alternated between the great works of the repertoire and the presentation of contemporary texts, with a constant concern to share them with a wide and diverse audience. From his first experiences with the creation of the "theatre hors les murs" in Marseilles to the itinerant theatre, under a marquee, at the Tréteaux de France, he never stopped going out to meet audiences who dared not cross the walls of theatrical institutions.
With constancy, he directed texts by Jacques Audiberti - the direction of La Poupée was presented in 1974 in the Cour d'Honneur of the Festival d'Avignon-, by Jean Vauthier, Louis Guilloux, authors to whom he was particularly attached, but also by Beckett, Ionesco, Hugo, Claudel, Brecht, and more recently Jean-Pierre Faye, Marcel Jouhandeau, David Mamet and Sam Shepard.
From 1975, he also directed his own texts - Une anémone for Guignol, Rhum-Lemonade, Saltimbanque, while performing many adaptations of great classics of literature.
Franck Riester «salutes the memory of an accomplished artist, anxious to address everyone, and of a director who knew how to inject an astonishing artistic vitality and radiate all the places he directed». He “sends his deepest condolences to his son Mathias, also an actor, his family and loved ones.”