Festival d'Avignon, July 4 – 25
In July, all roads will lead to Southern France; with its rich international program and wide-scope showing of France's theatrical arts, the Festival d'Avignon is one of Europe's densest festivals in terms of variety. Stage director Olivier Py, the festival's latest manager, did threaten to cancel last year's festival in protest of the right wing coming to power in the French government, but he didn't follow through with the threat. This year there is another dilemma – the festival must make do with a much smaller budget, and so viewers will be offered a much more compact program that has put emphasis on guaranteed crowd-pleasers.
One of these will be the icon of French theater and film, Isabelle Huppert, who will be reading fragments of works by the Marquis de Sade. Unified under the title of “Juliet et Justine, le vice et la vertu”, the event will take place in the festival's most honorable venue – the courtyard of the Papal Palace.
In French theater, the script is held to extremely high standards (oftentimes overriding the importance of set direction), which is why it is the deciding factor on whether or not a work is accepted into the Festival d'Avignon. With this in mind, we suggest that one have a very good understanding of the French language before going to see “Le Vivier des noms”. Written by Valere Novarina, France's most important dramaturgist of the current day, the production's power and allure are, in large part, due to the script.
The great French actress Fanny Ardant will also be very focused on her script as she performs the spoken-word opera “Kassandra”. Set to music by the French composer Michael Jarrell, it is based on the book of the same name by German author Krista Wolf.
Do not fear, however, if you are not a speaker of French, for there is much to see and hear at this festival that does not require good knowledge of the local language.
Before Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov is forced by Russian government officials to perform only productions that stick to the original script, he and Moscow's Gogol Center will be presenting “The Idiots”. It is a vibrant theatrical version loosely based on the film by Lars von Trier.
The theater company from Berlin's Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz has developed their staging of William Shakespeare's tragedy, “Richard III”, through physical and other methods instead of ones based on psychological mind-games. Interestingly enough, even though the director of the production, Thomas Ostermeier, is universally loathed by theater critics in his home country, he has become somewhat of a cult figure in France. Together with the actor Lars Eidinger, he has placed human disfigurement at the center of attention, thereby returning to the way that theater was performed back in Shakespeare's day – when a character's inner world was emphasized through his outer, physical form. Eidinger's rendition of King Richard III – a man whose achievements in social climbing were due to his ability to step over corpses and masterfully stir up intrigue – is quite controversial in that it oversteps boundaries that we now deem as taboo. Namely, the massive physical disabilities and deformations of the character are equated with his degraded and depraved mental state. www.festival-avignon.com
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