Luc Bondy's production of "THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE" aims to take the Marivaux figures away from the audience, so that distance engenders a clear-sightedness. In this way the main concern of Marivaux becomes clear: " In each person there are, as it were, two people; one who shows himself and another who hides".
The veritable mourners are locked inside a park of confusion; Hermocrates and his sister, Leontine, who have vowed to remain chaste and fled from the world, fall back into wretched and miserable transports of love due to sophisticated temptations, and are finally forced to return to the solitude of their ivory castle, doubly deceived. Princess Leonida does manage, though, to free Prince Agis, and return his sovereign authority, once taken from him by her father, to him.
But Bondy doesn't trust this happy end: love can't begin like that. The way the masks are torn from the faces of these people and their endeavours to save at least a fragment of their disguises for their souls and thoughts - disguises which they are losing - until they finally stand there, naked, defenceless; this is the fascination of the Marvauxian work, this shows the contemporary nature of the pretence. "Basically, we are created for love", sums up Agis. Yet nobody in the drama reaches the state of happiness, Kythera, the island of complete ecstasy.
(Bernd Sucher in Süddeutsche Zeitung)