A few nights before the French took their final vote in this summer’s snap parliamentary election, Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Festival d’Avignon, staged an all-night, ad-hoc rally against the far right in the Cour d’Honneur. This dramatic courtyard in the center of the Palais des Papes has been the festival’s marquee venue since its start, in 1947; audiences enter a steep stone box, open to the sky, with a massive performance area backed by one looming wall of the papal palace. Rodrigues, a Portuguese director, took the reins at the festival two years ago, and his “vision of the stage,” he has said, is a mixture of “the poetical, the political, and the personal.” This year, as the election approached, he declared that, if the nationalists took power, Avignon would become a “festival of resistance.”
The same day I landed in France, on July 7th, that particular electoral storm turned. And yet, despite the lulling heat of a Provençal summer, a sense of barely concealed combat still permeated the festival. (For one thing, you could spot, among the thousands of theatre bills and bulletins pinned around town, a few torn Marine Le Pen posters.) Avignon’s beauty has a tranquillizing effect: the old city’s medieval ramparts kept the (literal) traffic of the modern world at bay, and my gaze often floated up above the crowds to the linen-pale limestone buildings, drowsy behind wooden shutters. But even ten-foot-thick walls couldn’t block out the sound of a continuing, existential parry and thrust. In many productions, you could still hear the clash of right against left, artists against critics, brutal institutions against the vulnerable people they supposedly protect.
Before I arrived, the Spanish artist Angélica Liddell had used her performance of “Dämon” in the Cour d’Honneur to attack specific journalists in the audience—she mocked their criticism of her past works and then mooned them. Elsewhere, that kind of brawling dramatic force was directed at larger authorities. I came across Rodrigues himself at his own production, “Hécube, Pas Hécube,” in which a woman named Nadia (Elsa Lapoivre), an actress and a mother, confronts state abuses. The show, which was performed in a stunning repurposed rock quarry outside town, begins on the first day of rehearsal for a staging of Euripides’ tragedy “Hecuba,” in which a Trojan queen learns that she has accidentally entrusted her young son to a murderer. Between rehearsals, Nadia loses herself in a narratively parallel struggle: demanding justice for her own child, who has been abused in a government-run care home. The production offered a strange blend of righteous fury, joyfully executed backstage comedy, and, much to my unease, a full-company impersonation of an autistic boy dancing. As we waited for darkness to fall over the quarry and the show to start, I asked Rodrigues about his sense of political deliverance, and he spoke about “a great weight” being lifted—temporarily.
Rodrigues clearly wants to incorporate a sense of the world and its agon into much of the work he programs. As in last year’s edition, the festival featured shows from a “spotlight” language—in this case, Spanish—but the overriding emphasis, at least in the pieces I saw, seemed to be on declamatory, often message-driven pieces. He also programmed the Cour d’Honneur with “Mothers: A Song for Wartime,” Marta Górnicka’s explicitly activist song cycle, performed by a choir of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Polish women, which changes the lyrics of Ukrainian folk songs to rally Europe to the defense of Ukraine. “Give us what was promised!” they sing, moving in a flying wedge, like F-16s in formation.
In that same courtyard, I watched the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s “Elizabeth Costello,” a mysterious, eventually laborious adaptation of scenes from various J. M. Coetzee stories and novels. The performance stretched through the middle of the night—we got there at 10 p.m. and left at 2 A.M.—and its longueurs were too punishing for me. Still, I can feel my mind straining back past the show’s indulgent last hour (ickily narrated by adults pretending to be children) to its startling first. An actor playing Coetzee (Mariusz Bonaszewski) answers a panel’s questions about the character Elizabeth Costello, an elderly author who pops up in many of Coetzee’s works. “I’m not sure I ever had control over her,” he says. Of course, he knows that his fictional character isn’t autonomous, but, he muses, “there is nothing wrong with talking in metaphor.” Costello herself (Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak, one of several actors playing the role) soon emerges to give a talk on the impossibility of realism in the modern era, discussing a Kafka story in which an ape speaks to an academy of men about his process of becoming human. The reader cannot be certain whether an ape is actually speaking or if Kafka is writing obliquely about Jewishness in Prague. Kafka’s meaning evades us, Costello observes, as it will forever. “The word-mirror is broken,” she says.
In each production I saw, the performances laid some claim to post-dramatic authenticity. There was an overwhelming sense that pretending—in the theatre!—has become not just unfashionable but passé. (The German scholar and dramaturge Florian Malzacher has written elegantly about avoiding theatre’s “representational trap.”) Everywhere in Avignon we were in communication with “the real”: no fourth wall went unbroken; actors almost invariably called attention to themselves as actors. Sometimes they were actually non-actors playing themselves, as in the rollicking quasi-musical “Los Días Afuera” (“The Days Outside”), in which the Argentinean director Lola Arias collaborated with former inmates to describe their lives both in and out of prison.
Even shows that were not documentary productions in the strict sense gestured toward the conventions of that kind of work. The performers in “Mothers” would like us to know that they are really mothers. In “Hécube, Pas Hécube,” Rodrigues’s fictional text is explicitly prosecutorial and procedural. (If we are to be trained as audiences, let us also be trained as juries.) The use of nonprofessional actors onstage has been key to avant-garde theatre practice outside the U.S. since at least the two-thousands, and, although we certainly do make documentation-based work in our theatre—think of “Is This a Room,” taken from the transcript of Reality Winner’s interrogation by the F.B.I., or “The Laramie Project”—it is still very much an exception.
The most beautiful, and stealthily moving, of the documentary shows I attended was Mohamed El Khatib’s “La Vie Secrète des Vieux” (“The Secret Life of Old People”). El Khatib stands onstage with his elderly cast, occasionally prompting them with amused warmth, as they relate what has become of their erotic lives as they’ve aged. Both the show and its raconteurs operate with infinite mischief—for example, a screen warns us at the start of the show that someone onstage might die. “Stay calm, and consider whether it is better to have died onstage than in a nursing home,” the supertitles coolly tell us. Later, the performers take a group snapshot with an urn.
In one instance, the permeation of real and carnivalesque, true and false, amateur and professional in Avignon reduced me to rubble. In “Léviathan,” a terrifying burlesque of the French court system directed by Lorraine de Sagazan, actors wearing plastic masks and moving like windup toys act out several swift “immediate” trials: legal procedures that are offered to those who are caught red-handed. Only two performers are not masked. The first is our host, a man named Khallaf Baraho, who tells us that, in real life, he was actually convicted in sixteen minutes and twenty-four seconds during just such a trial—“I am an experienced customer of the police,” he says. The other is a lovely, exquisitely trained white Camargue horse. As the human suffering turns excruciating, he trots into the theatre’s silk-draped tent and begins to eat pages out of the judge’s law books. The evening I saw the play, he also pissed on the courtroom floor. I am pretty sure that he was being metaphorical. ♦