The Parisian theatre company is on a rare visit to the UK with Ivo van Hove’s The Damned. What are the secrets of the world’s oldest active troupe?

Companies like nothing more than to refer to themselves, unironically, as families. The actors of Paris’s Comédie-Française have a better claim than most, however: for starters, directors keep casting them as fratricidal dynasties. Just this season, the oldest active theatre troupe in the world has portrayed a tribe pushed to the brink in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; the murderous siblings Electra and Orestes; and the Essenbecks, the wealthy Nazi-era family that comes undone in The Damned.

Now London audiences will get to see some of the Comédie-Française’s star performers lock horns, too. This week, The Damned, staged by Ivo van Hove and based on Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film, will open at London’s Barbican. It is the French company’s first UK tour in nearly two decades. The production is hardly traditional, with spare sets and extensive live filming, yet as an intergenerational tragedy, it hits the mark chillingly.

It’s a fitting vehicle for the singular, self-managed troupe, where the actors are the main stakeholders. “No one really knows this house,” suggests Christophe Montenez, who joined five years ago and plays the decadent Martin von Essenbeck in The Damned. “People are fascinated, scared – they think it’s a nest of vipers or the Atreides” (in Greek mythology, the less-than-peaceful family of Electra and Orestes). I’m assured by everyone I meet that this is an old-fashioned idea. “It really is a family,” Montenez says, unprompted.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We’ve played lovers, siblings, cousins, we’ve sweated and been naked on stage together’ … Eric Ruf. Photograph: Brigitte Enguerand/Divergence

The Comédie-Française certainly boasts an impressive ancestry. Based at the Salle Richelieu, near the Louvre, the company has weathered over three centuries of artistic and political storms. In the hallway next to the office of the current director, Eric Ruf, known as the administrator, a list of 51 names is carved into a marble wall. They represent every Comédie-Française dean (an important office, held by the longest-serving company member) since 1658. The first is none other than the playwright Molière – an honorary father figure, since the Comédie-Française was officially born in 1680, the fusion of his troupe and another.

“Sometimes young directors who come in think: that’s nice, but I have my own collective,” says Ruf, a Comédie-Française actor and set designer appointed administrator in 2014. “I tell them that they’re going to work with the oldest collective in the world. If you like to direct people who know each other, well, we’ve played lovers, siblings, cousins, we’ve sweated and been naked on stage together.”

As we sit around a large table covered in notes and documents for an upcoming production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Ruf’s deep, melodious voice strikes me anew. After joining the company in 1993, he spent two decades acting in everything from Molière and Victor Hugo to Tennessee Williams, and it shows: he phrases his answers with warm elegance and the odd literary flourish. “The administrator who hired me said that a Comédie-Française actor is an operator of the verb, and I like that idea,” he says.

The company’s reverence for texts makes it an outlier in contemporary French theatre. For the past few decades, experimental directors have received the lion’s share of attention in the country, and steered critical attention away from a play’s integrity. As the last permanent troupe in France, the Comédie-Française plays a vital role in passing down the craft that goes into performing French dramatic verse, from Racine’s hieratic alexandrines to Paul Claudel’s free verse. To this day, the literary merit of every play that joins the repertoire is assessed by a reading committee, although the rules have been relaxed to allow adaptations such as The Damned.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guillaume Gallienne (centre) and members of the company in Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

It isn’t the only seemingly quaint house tradition. Company members are split into two groups, the pensionnaires and the sociétaires. Pensionnaires such as Montenez are hired by the administrator on one-year contracts, while the 39 sociétaires are seasoned actors who own stakes in the troupe. Every artist’s performance is reviewed yearly by a committee composed of the administrator, the dean and eight sociétaires, who have the power to let their peers go and to promote the pensionnaires.

“It’s extremely difficult, but it’s better to have the opinion of 10 people than just one person,” says Claude Mathieu, the current dean, who trained with the legendary French director Antoine Vitez before joining in 1979. “Otherwise, like every other company, it would be made up of the director’s own actors.” Some dismissals still make headlines, not least when they involve popular performers. “It’s not just about the actor: it’s also the sociétaire, the person. An older company member who can’t stand the younger ones may be an issue.”

The cliche of the airhead actor doesn’t fly at the Comédie-Française. The board is composed entirely of sociétaires, who approve the budget and other strategic decisions. If a company member misses a performance without a good reason, he or she must pay the lost box-office revenue, and the repertoire system is intense, with several productions on at once. “Before I joined, the stage had a sacred aspect for me. I had a lot of rituals, I would put on a lot of creams,” the 30-year-old Montenez says with a laugh. “Here, you’re on so much that you develop an instinct on stage.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You’re on stage so much you develop an instinct’ …The Damned. Photograph: Jan Versweyveld

It’s a utopian model that may well be on trend again, as the egalitarian theatre collectives that have sprung up in France in recent years suggest. The Comédie-Française’s motto is “Simul et singulis” – together yet individual. “There was a stronger hierarchy when I first joined, but productions are collective efforts these days. Everyone is equal, whether you’re 25 or 70 years old,” Mathieu explains. “A lazy actor is going to have a hard time. We have a joke: you’re very singulis at the moment, you’re just thinking about yourself!”

The Comédie-Française continues to produce its fair share of stars. Among the cast of The Damned, Denis Podalydès and Guillaume Gallienne are household names in France, with film careers on the side. Elsa Lepoivre, who plays Sophie von Essenbeck, is widely considered one of the finest stage actors of her generation. Montenez is only the latest to make a name for himself, with a TV series in the works.

This actor-led setup means the administrator has less power than most artistic directors, despite being responsible for programming. The system favours insiders who can navigate the Comédie-Française’s checks and balances, and after a slow start, Ruf’s leadership has blossomed into a steady success. Prestigious international directors, from Van Hove to Thomas Ostermeier, have made their house debuts, while Ruf has initiated a push for more diversity, on stage and in the wings.

A lazy actor is going to have a hard time here Claude Mathieu

His rule of gender parity among the directors working across the Comédie-Française’s three stages is especially meaningful in France, where there is still resistance to any serious examination of institutional sexism. When I tell him he is setting an example, he replies with characteristic measure. “I’m lucky: there are plenty of impressive female directors in the younger generation. Some tell me it’s not enough, that there aren’t enough women on the main stage. I agree, but I don’t want to set quotas, I want to do things intelligently. It’s not easy to harness the Salle Richelieu: it can burn someone.”

The administrator sees racial diversity on stage as an even longer game. Despite a couple of recent hires, the company remains overwhelmingly white, with limited turnover. When Ruf cast Gaël Kalimindi, a black actor, as the son of the blond Elsa Lepoivre in Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia, there was some pushback from within the institution. “The audience doesn’t care, but some professionals still tell me: yes, but if the mother is white …”

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Ruf’s contract is up in August, but if it is renewed for a second five-year term, as is highly likely, he will steward the Comédie-Française through another momentous transition. In 2024, the company is scheduled to swap its two smaller stages (the Studio-Théâtre, underneath the Louvre Pyramid, and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier) for a pair of newly built ones at the Cité du Théâtre, a multipurpose site currently being renovated in the north of Paris. The larger, more flexible auditoriums should bring in much-needed additional revenue, since the institution’s annual public grant of €24.5m hasn’t kept up with its labour costs (around €29m).

There will be challenges ahead for France’s premier theatre family on that front, but in the meantime, Ruf would be grateful if everyone stopped asking how he intends to rejuvenate the supposedly “dusty” institution. “There is an anchor in our longevity, a weightiness that can be fertile. If this company has been active since 1680, isn’t it somewhat exemplary?”

• The Damned is at the Barbican, London, 19-25 June.