Vincent Macaigne
Driven by a fierce desire to have the voice of the theatre be heard in a world in crisis, the actor Vincent Macaigne became a director to express himself on a stage transformed into a battlefield of bodies and ideas. Eagerly facing death through different versions of a constantly reworked Requiem, fighting against it through a profusion of assumed and amplified artifices, he forcefully thrusts forward his confidence in a theatre art capable of keeping man on his feet. Playing with a certain form of naiveté in his encounter with the founding myths, he knows how to build his deconstruction, rejecting any gratuitousness, but defending the urgency of the artistic act. It is this urgency that has also made him an author who blends his voice with that of the great playwrights he admires: Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. Rewriting The Idiot, he burdens the hero with his own anxieties and hopes that he succeeds in having embodied by actors from whom he demands a total physical commitment. A constant involvement that forces them to not pretend, to take every risk to reveal the truth that is hidden behind the rituals of a theatre turned upside-down. Following the action through, not neglecting anything to heat up dreams and even accelerate them, opposing the violence of the world to the violence of an art in which speech is directly addressed, whether it is a cry of anger, despair or love for a mistreated humanity, all this can be found in the heart of the work of Vincent Macaigne, a joyous man in despair who never admits defeat. He is coming to the Festival d'Avignon for the first time.
JFP, May, 2011.