After revisiting Shakespeare’s Hamlet with eight actors with Down syndrome, you have chosen to adapt another classic from the repertoire, Chekhov’s The Seagull, with a troupe of blind and visually impaired actresses and actors.
In Hamlet, working with those actresses and actors allowed me to approach theatre in a different way. No one expected to see the title role played by an actor with Down syndrome. By subverting expectations in this way, we were able to approach the question of the human condition from a different angle: the famous “to be or not to be” monologue resonated in a new way… I found this shift particularly fruitful and I wanted to try it again with The Seagull. Chekhov’s play urges us to question our own capacity to see, to interrogate our own blindness. The words spoken by a troupe of blind or visually impaired actresses and actors take on different meanings: they open to new interpretations. Their bodies express ideas and images that sighted performers would not be able to convey. The play shifts from comedy to tragedy and back without the slightest condescension, freed from any tearful, pathetic, or romantic perspective.
Yours is a free adaptation of Chekhov’s play. Can you tell us more about it?
This free adaptation is performed, as we mentioned, by a group of blind or visually impaired performers, and our aim is to bring the audience—through the narrative—to the reality experienced by these people. The actresses and actors have embraced Chekhov’s characters, blending the text with their own lives and their own experience in order to give it all back on stage. One could say it is a “regeneration” of the texts. It is a sort of vast canvas on which we intertwine the experience of blind people, of the actors themselves, and of Chekhov’s characters. The simple fact that these texts—which have been read, performed, and heard many times on stage—are now spoken by actors with disabilities gives them a whole new dimension, a whole new meaning.
Is the cast entirely made up of blind and visually impaired performers?
The cast is made up of twelve actors, most of whom are blind or visually impaired. Only three are sighted. One of them is an usher who interacts with the audience. Before the play even begins, she describes what is happening in the theatre to the actresses and actors using audio description. There is also a musician, Nacho Bilbao, present on stage throughout the play. And the character of Boris Trigorin is sighted, in a choice that becomes clear to the audience over the course of the play.
For this creation, you are working with Spain’s Centro Dramático Nacional, which is taking part in the Festival d’Avignon for the first time. But before starting work on this play, you worked with a Peruvian company called sinVERguenzas. What did that research entail?
Indeed, when I began adapting this play, I worked for five month with the Peruvian company sinVERguenzas, which is made up of thirteen blind actors. It was a sort of laboratory based on texts and scenes from The Seagull. We conducted long interviews during which I was able to understand their reality and draw from it. It was, in a way, an exchange: I led a theatre workshop and, in return, they taught me many things about their everyday life. The texts I was working on gradually transformed thanks to their contributions.
The meaning of existence is a major theme in Chekhov’s work. How did those questions inspire you?
Two themes mainly inspired me and are at the heart of my work on The Seagull: the meaning of existence and the purpose of theatre. Chekhov’s characters are afflicted, overwhelmed by a feeling of failure and uselessness. They are tormented by their desires, in love with people who do not love them back, full of ambitions far beyond their own capabilities. They are nostalgic for a lost paradise. The actresses and actors who play them, on the other hand, have the capacity to understand their characters and embrace them with humour and empathy—maybe because they ask themselves the same questions… When he wrote this play, Chekhov did not really try to question the behaviour of those characters. He did not take sides. He showed them as they are: the rest is up to us!
Live music also plays an important role in the show. What sort of instruments are you using? What does the music bring to your adaptation?
Musician and composer Nacho Bilbao shares the stage with the actors. He is surrounded by a piano and mixing consoles which he uses to create musical sequences and sound effects. His contribution is very important, all the more so because the show features individuals whose connection to the world is primarily through hearing.
Can you tell us more about the audio description aimed at the actresses and actors and produced live by the usher before the performance begins?
The idea is to describe the audience. What are they doing? They turn off their mobile phones, they enter the auditorium, look for their seats, sit down in the bleachers, talk among themselves, read the programme. The audience is thus exposed and connected to the performers. Our goal is to create a feeling of great closeness and interaction to transform the original text. We want to the audience to imagine what life for those blind and visually impaired people might be: all through theatrical gestures and, more broadly, through the theatrical act itself.
Beyond this sense of closeness, the interaction with the audience also arises from the experience you offer them, addressing the question of memory…
This is one of those small theatrical gestures we were talking about. Less than 2% of blind people are blind from birth. Most of them use their memory and their imagination to “see”… Building on this observation, we offer the audience a unique experience. Before the performance begins, they can see on stage a set and props typical of Anton Chekhov’s work: a table, a 19th-century style lamp, a desk, a rug, etc. When the play begins, all of that disappears, never to come back. At the end, we present the audience with an exercise: thanks to an audio description of the vanished set, we ask them to remember, to reconstruct in their minds and imagination the original set. The audience and the performers therefore find themselves in the same situation, under the same conditions, having to rely on their memory to reconstruct the setting of the play. This experience invites us to ask ourselves this final question: can we remember and reconstruct through memory, or through imagination, what we saw just a few minutes ago?
Interview conducted by Vanessa Asse (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach