With Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont, the Festival invites you every year to create a play based on the repertoire and connected to this edition’s guest language. How is Quixote a continuation of last year’s Dream?
Last year, I noticed how generous the audience was. They wanted to take part in an experience that went beyond a simple reflection around a text. They wanted to better understand the way a show is made. With Quixote, we are moving towards an intensification of this approach, which allows me to create almost in real time. This year, starting in the spring, I held workshops open to all. Anyone willing to do theatre with me was invited. Those workshops allowed me to share the questions we asked ourselves about Don Quixote during rehearsals with the actors. The garden on rue de Mons at the Maison Jean Vilar remains our headquarters. I like the idea of returning to that place, to make it a vibrant hub for this cycle. I see The Dream and Quixote as attempts to bring into existence something that doesn’t yet exist. To manifest my vision of theatre. It is a production of meaning to stand firm against chaos. It may seem like a dizzying or even mystical desire, but it is what I rely on to bring together people who are happy to be looking for meaning. In The Dream, I got a merry band of fifty-somethings to play a sort of children’s game, a fantasised theatre. My approach is the same with this Quixote.
Don Quixote wants to test literature against reality. He leaves his books behind to fight battles. Do you feel close to this character? Who is he, according to you?
Indeed, like Don Quixote who, armed with his literary quotations, sets out to confront reality in the name of justice, I too propose to take on both Cervantes’s novel and theatre, armed with the experience I have gained from engaging with the most illustrious playwrights: Shakespeare, Racine, Sophocles, Molière… I am moved by this man who decides to embrace what he has read to confront reality. In a way, this is how I make theatre. I take what is in a book and transform it to see what it might mean in real life. In the novel, Cervantes wonders how, at a certain point, a philosophy of life can lead to a transformation of the world. I am deeply driven by this heroic desire to do theatre, not with a spear but by working on reality to transform it with the tools of theatre. When I think of this character, I first think of Cervantes himself who, aged 24, took part in the Battle of Lepanto where the Ottoman fleet of Selim II and the fleet of the Holy League clashed, with the latter emerging victorious. Cervantes himself was captured and enslaved by the Turks. For five years, literature would be his refuge, a way to distance himself from reality. This was a situation experienced by a significant portion of the European male population at the time. The giants Don Quixote sees are similar to a post-traumatic response: a reaction to the violence of that war.
Was Don Quixote an escape for Cervantes?
Cervantes uses literature not as an escape, but as an alternative to Western civilisation, which is in the process of conquering the world. Don Quixote fights the ghost upon which his world, Europe, is built, so that it does not happen again. He is not a gentle madman who has read so many books that the reality he sees feels pixelated. He tackles head on ideologies, particularly religious one, which generate violence. This epic novel can also be read as a sort of parody. He shows what happens when texts are used to spread an ideology that transforms reality. Cervantes argues that some battles can be meaningless and destroy those who fight them, in the name of what they have read. With this character, he opens up spaces to think differently, to break free from that reality and transcend it. He refuses to give up, but without anger or malice: rather with humour and love. That’s how I see the role of Sancho Panza. In the novel, he offers a rather brilliant political alternative: kindness, listening, and love as the only truly viable utopia.
It is a funny novel, but you argue that it is mostly cruel…
During the first rehearsals, we enacted the series of adventures Don Quixote goes through. This highlighted the succession of abuses, violent episodes, and humiliations he endures, either due to his own delusional actions, or inflicted as retaliation or even gratuitously by those who take advantage of his gullibility and self-deception. In the novel, this almost systematically provokes laughter and mockery. Those scenes of bullying, torture, and other punishment are always written in a comedic tone to elicit as much mirth as possible from the complicit reader. But Don Quixote resists: exposed to a relentless barrage of mockery and to the brutality of a normative society, he continues to aspire to an unreachable star. The effects of his resistance are trivial at best: all he manages to do is to damage a windmill and decimate sheep and goats… His method is probably not the right one, but his madness is necessary, liberating, healthy, and sincere. It shakes the boundaries of our confinement.
What cuts did you make in this great novel to adapt it for the stage? What major episodes did you keep?
I did not try at all to stay faithful to the novel, to turn it into a sort of puzzle based on emblematic episodes. I decided to break into the text, as it were. As if it were a kind of theatre manual. Chapter by chapter, I tried to extract materials, modes of theatricality specific to the narration, the dialogues, the action… It allowed me to build a panoptic vision of the work from the character of Dulcinea and the love Don Quixote has for her.
Jeanne Balibar plays Quixote, Thierry Dupon plays Sancho Panza, Marie-Noëlle plays Rocinante, Quixote’s horse, and you play the donkey Rucio, el burro. How did you imagine those roles?
Like a four-person expedition! I did not specifically imagine the characters of the novel as so many roles for the theatre. I was interested in figures. That’s why Jeanne plays Quixote, for instance: because she can also embody the ghost of Dulcinea, this dream of the other, this quest for love. In the play, her presence is that of absolute otherness. I think the best way to stage Don Quixote is to find one’s Dulcinea and to ask her to play the role! Especially since Dulcinea is always a guide, a beacon for Don Quixote. Marie-Noëlle plays a very determined horse, the true driving force of the novel. In the book, Rocinante decides the path the expedition will follow and reflects back his own image to Don Quixote, the image he will have to fight. The donkey is the beast of burden. Thierry Dupont is the one who takes care of the others, who protects all of them from Quixote’s hallucinations… But by describing each character so much, we risk putting Don Quixote in a box: let him reveal himself to us on his own terms.
Interview conducted in January 2024 and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach