In most of your works, you invite the audience to “plunge” into one or several literary works. This was the case with Joueurs, Mao II, Les Noms, or Les Particules élémentaires. What drives you in this work of adaptation?
I would like to be a director capable of creating a show from a concept. But I have to admit that I don’t work that way. It is often through reading a piece of writing that the idea of a performance emerges for me. I love making my way towards an author. For me, staging a text does not mean celebrating it or making it more audible. The text is an autonomous force. Staging it is more like a form of confrontation: it is altered, translated, transformed. Its adaptation should allow differences in viewpoints and sensibilities to emerge between the author and the director.
Is “When art and evil meet” the guiding thread of Maldoror?
Some artists spend their entire lives walking alongside evil. Why are they interested in the greatest forms of violence? What do they have in common with those who commit the greatest evil? It was from this reflection that Maldoror was born. Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-bas served as the starting point. In the first scene of this book, two characters discuss the literature of their time, that of the late nineteenth century. One tells the other that literary naturalism cannot fully account for reality, and that a black naturalism, or even a mystical one, should be invented, one capable of describing human passions and society, but also unknown forces. In other words, Joris-Karl Huysmans develops the idea that existence and evil are mysteries, and that literature and art should set themselves the task of observing their dark matter, accepting the idea that there is a negative, unrepresentable world: an elsewhere. Reading these pages, I had the feeling that the picture Joris-Karl Huysmans paints of naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century could also apply to theatre at the beginning of the twenty-first.
Ten years ago, you came to the Festival d’Avignon with an adaptation of 2666, a novel by Roberto Bolaño. Today, with Maldoror, you are once again drawing on the works of this Chilean author.
Roberto Bolaño is a Latin American writer who lived in Europe. He stands at the border between the two continents. I sometimes perceive in him a melancholy inherited from twentieth-century European literature; a melancholy that resonates with me. In my directing work, I probably tend to draw him in that direction, whereas other artists might choose to explore more of the Latin American dimension of his writing.
There are authors with whom we build an almost fraternal bond. When we read them, we feel we understand them and that we are returning to something essential. That is exactly what I feel about Roberto Bolaño. He constantly wrote about memory, violence, and literature. The “secret of evil” is an expression that recurs often in his novel 2666. He is also a funny writer, which is no small thing in literature. And there is this sense of following him across his entire life through his books. He writes fragments in one novel, then reuses them in another. All his texts echo one another in a kind of completely chaotic constellation.
Roberto Bolaño, Comte de Lautréamont, Joris-Karl Huysmans… Why did you choose to bring these three authors together? What do they have in common?
In his work, Roberto Bolaño relates to Joris-Karl Huysmans and Comte de Lautréamont. All three carry out closely related explorations of literature and violence. For instance, Joris-Karl Huysmans was fascinated by Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century baron, companion of Joan of Arc, notorious for having raped and murdered children. Roberto Bolaño, for his part, showed a strong interest in Nazis and serial killers. This show is structured around several novels by Roberto Bolaño, including Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star. Within this structure, Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont functions as a source text: it permeates the entire play, passes through it in successive fragments, and colours its atmosphere.
In all your plays, you keep revisiting the position of the audience. It oscillates between theatre and cinema, between watching a stage or a film. They are sometimes facing the stage, sometimes seated in a bifrontal setup, or even invited into the heart of the action. What draws you to this shift in perspective?
To answer this question, I have to talk about two needs I can’t help but feel. First, I need the form of theatre to literally explode, to disintegrate. Second, I would like theatre to replace life. This is a somewhat extreme position. But I don’t like the idea that a play is just a moment, a parenthesis before going out to dinner. What interests me is that the life of the audience and the life of the form come together and produce a single, unique time. As for the shift in perspective, it is essential. The stage must be observable in different ways. It must be a space traversed by an accumulation of signs—images, bodies, voices, and sounds—which each spectator chooses to grasp or not. I remember that when I was 18 or 19, I discovered La Chambre d’Isabella by Jan Lauwers at the Festival d’Avignon. For the first time, I was not simply seeing someone speak while we listened, but a buzzing swarm of objects and people dancing on one side, singing on the other. This idea of the stage as a dense, living experience stayed with me. So I try to ensure that the stage is not a corridor guiding the gaze in a single direction, but an open space.
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse in February 2026