Jean-Claude Idée, the theater man, is dead

Theater man Jean-Claude Idée died of cancer on Friday August 26 at the age of 70. Born November 27, 1951 in Ixelles, Belgium, the director trained as an actor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. In fifty years of career in the service of the theatre, he signed, tirelessly, more than a hundred productions in Belgium and France, both for the private and public circuit. From Racine to Sam Sheppard, from Corneille to Jean Anouilh, from Molière to Ionesco, from Shakespeare to Obaldiafrom Goldoni to Giraudouxfrom Marivaux to Sartre, from Garcia Lorca to Jules Romansfrom Edmond Rostand to Peter Shaffer or Jacques-Pierre Amette or even from Chekhov to himself. At the same time, he successfully co-directed the Théâtre du Résidence Palace in Brussels for three years and the Royal Festival de Spa for six years.

In 1989, he created the Magasin d’Ecriture Théâtrale, with the aim of promoting contemporary theatrical writing. As an author, he wrote, among other things, The House of the Dead Gods and Van der Goes Madness (Editions Le Scream, 1982). He has also signed many adaptations for the theater including Don Quixote by Cervantes, Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky at the Théâtre Mouffetard, or even King’s Alley by Françoise Chandernagor premiered at the Théâtre Montparnasse, (Gallimard edition – Le Manteau d’Arlequin collection), which was nominated four times for the Molières in 1995 and performed 850 times.

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Let’s not forget his staging of Teacher ! by Jean-Pierre Dopagne with John Piat, at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse (2002), then at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées (2007) and played nearly 450 times. Following his meeting with the philosopher Michel Onfray, in 2013 he founded the People’s Theater Universities. To date, they have brought together more than 100,000 spectators in Belgium and France. He was also professor of Dramatic Art at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels until 2016. In 2018, he performed with Emmanuel Dechartre at the Théâtre 14 The Memento by Jean Vilar, a great figure whose thought the playwright claims to have with passion.

In recent years, Jean-Claude Idée has staged two plays of his creation: Because it was him – Montaigne & La Boétie (2014 and 2017), and the excellent St-Ex in New York (2021). It is still him who mounts the first piece ofHervé Bentegeat, Best Alliesin 2017 or per piece one of us two of Jean-Noel Jeanneney (2019), all at the Théâtre du Petit Montparnasse. He was still showing at the Petit Montparnasse in 2021 and 2022 with Elysium by Hervé Bentégeat, with Emmanuel Dechartre, Christophe Barbier, Adrien Melin and Alexandra Ansidei.