Bérénice 34-44, the play adapted from Isabelle Stibbe's novel, in Versailles for Molière Month.

Adapted from Isabelle Stibbe’s novel, Bérénice 34-44 is staged in the Courtyard of the Hôtel des Affaires étrangères in Versailles, for Molière Month, on June 6 and 7, 2026. This play, directed by Pierre-Olivier Scotto, revisits the fate of a Jewish actress facing the Occupation.

The theatre can also give voice to what history has silenced. Bérénice 34-44, a play adapted from Isabelle Stibbe’s novel by Violette Erhart, will be staged at the Cour de l’Hôtel des Affaires étrangères in Versailles, as part of the Mois Molière. It will be shown on Saturday, June 6, 2026 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, June 7, 2026 at 6:00 pm. Directed by Pierre-Olivier Scotto, this stage adaptation retraces the saga of Bérénice Kapelouchnick, a Jewish teenage theater enthusiast who becomes an actress under the stage name Bérénice de Lignières.

The story opens in 1934, when Bérénice is 15. The daughter of a father who arrived from Eastern Europe after the Russian pogroms, she grows up in France with the ambition of becoming an actress. Despite family opposition, she earns a place at the Conservatoire and joins the class of Louis Jouvet. Her path then leads to the Comédie-Française, where she becomes a sociétaire. The production traces the ascent of a young woman finding her footing in French theatre, before the political climate upends her fate.

At the outset of the German Occupation, even before Vichy’s racial laws were enacted, the Comédie-Française expelled Jewish members from its troupe. Bérénice, denounced in an anonymous letter, is forced to confront a reality she can no longer shield herself from. Performed by Violette Erhart, the play tackles antisemitic persecution, administrative erasure, and the fragility of an artistic career under decisions dictated by a grim era.

Presented at the 30th edition of the Molière Month, a festival of theatre and live performance in Versailles running from May 30 to June 30, 2026, Bérénice 34-44 offers a narrative grounded in memory, theatre, and the violence of exclusion. The figure of Bérénice thus leaves us with a larger question: what remains of a vocation when history decides to interrupt its course.

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