It is one of those long-haul adventures that the Festival d'Avignon very much likes. A slightly mad challenge: staging in its entirety one of Shakespeare's marathon works, Henry VI. No less than three plays, 15 acts, 150 characters and 10,000 verses to trace the 50 years of the reign of the man who was proclaimed king of England at the age of nine months and was assassinated in cold blood by the future Richard III.
For the last several years, Thomas Jolly has focused with ardour and faith on this extraordinary theatre machinery that Shakespeare developed in this "saga", which stretches from the Hundred Years' War to the War of the Roses and brilliantly intermingles comedy and tragedy, historical reality and dramatic fiction. A tremendous playing field for this young director and his 20 actors who will make a vow, in Avignon, of holding us spellbound for four four-hour episodes performed one after the other.
This means a 16-hour-long show: an epic, for the artists as well as the spectators, which recalls the one that Olivier Py proposed in 1995 to festival-goers with La Servante, histoire sans fin [The Servant, an Endless Story]. Like the new director of the Festival d'Avignon, Thomas Jolly is wagering on time, duration, in a period during which urgency ceaselessly attempts to impose its sterile reign. Through the Henry VI project, he is particularly driven by the idea of a “short-lived community sharing, in the same place and at the same time, a section of history, looking together at what the centuries that separate us from these characters have to teach us. A community that, during the intermissions, exchanges ideas and holds discussions.” Like the one that is reborn every summer at the Festival d'Avignon.
A few words from Thomas Jolly about Henry VI
“Written in the 16th century and relating almost the entire 15th century, this monumental work is de facto inserted in the turning point of our history. And that is in fact what drew me to it. It shows the slow shift from an old period, a declining Middle Ages, to a new period, which I would like to think of as being the origin of ours. The abandonment, by man, of a world of community values for an individualized world. Staging Henry VI, is therefore, I believe, questioning our period again by its beginnings. It is not a coquetry because it was also with this aim that Shakespeare wrote it for his spectators.”
