The award-winning actor, director, and scenographer Éric Ruf discusses his role since 2014 as administrateur general (artistic director) of the Comédie-Française. In discussion with Clare Siviter, Ruf offers readers a glimpse into the world’s oldest continually performing troupe. He describes the legacy and symbolic weight for performers today of the building and its history, and how they negotiate innovations such as price reform and live streaming, when steeped in such tradition.

Clare Siviter and Emmanuela Wroth begin their chapter by establishing France’s best known women actors, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, as a barometer for the hypervisibility of French women performers’ bodies. Siviter and Wroth explore two case studies that paved the way for the late nineteenth-century celebrity which Bernhardt and Rachel embodied: the ‘Bataille des Dames’ between Mlle George and Mlle Duchesnois at the start of the nineteenth century and the Restoration rivalry between Classicism and Romanticism personified by Mlle Mars and Marie Dorval. They focus on three particular sites: the women’s physical presence and experience of their gendered bodies including their voices; their often sexualized fetishization in contemporary print; and their memorialization both in their autobiographies and in theatre history. Having analysed the roles of class, gender and sexuality, they return to the hypervisibility of Rachel and later Bernhardt’s bodies, and the important questions these women’s bodies raise regarding other marginalized identities, especially in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’.