Before we look into your adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, can we talk about how it’s part of a larger project, conceived specifically for the Festival d’Avignon, and called Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont?
When I was invited by the Festival d’Avignon, I first started thinking about the kind of concrete action or service we could do for the city’s inhabitants. And I thought that the first, and maybe the only, concrete thing to do would be to use the stones of the ramparts that wall the city in to finish building the bridge that’s made it so popular. This idea of Dismantling the ramparts to finish the bridge which was, let’s be honest, also kind of a provocative joke, became a metaphorical principle which goes beyond the context of the city to become a sort of motto, an artist’s vocation. In the end, it’s the name I wanted to give to my commitment to the Festival d’Avignon. Can we change the world through theatre? Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont aims to become a repertoire of “great classics” which I’ll put on with a team made up both of actors and actresses I’ve worked with for a long time and others met in Avignon. The first play is an adaptation for four actors of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I decided to call, in a very functional manner, Le Songe (The Dream). I chose that work because it features an actor playing a wall, a wall that separates the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe and through which, having found a crack in the wall, they’re able to speak to each other. No wall can resist love. This repertoire will unfold over the next four years. The other plays will be other great classics chosen based on the language spotlighted every year by the Festival. The place where we’ll present this repertoire is the Jardin de Mons, often called the garden of the Maison Jean Vilar. Because Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont is also an homage to Jean Vilar’s utopia.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a baroque comedy in which the motif of desire comes back time and again. In that way, it is unlike any of Shakespeare’s other plays. How did you approach it?
I’m 53 years old, and this invitation by the Festival d’Avignon is at once a symbol of recognition and the opportunity to question myself. What of my desperate need to make theatre? With every new direction, I fear I won’t be able to do it. It’s a fear that’s never left me, that’s grown over time. Is it the fear of losing the innocence of the first look, the fear of not loving, of not knowing how to love anymore? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, four young people, caught up in their desire for each other, flee human society to lose themselves in a wild forest. In a purely mimetic way, I’d want to get lost in the forest with them and discover or rediscover my own desire for the theatre. For this show, I therefore invited four actors and actresses who were with me during the founding of the Théâtre permanent d’Aubervilliers in 2009. Alongside them, I want once again to try to do something impossible by adapting Le Songe for four performers. I think true creation can only happen when you face the impossible. My relationship to theatre is deeply existential in nature. It is first and foremost an experience of life, a human experience which connects with the dramatic material to produce artistic forms. I see my relationship to any given text as a confrontation: a clash between me and the other members of the team on one side, and the text on the other. This clash leads to the creation of an unprecedented space of possible life. It’s that new life that drives the show we then present to the public. Desire is an incredible force of projection. In Le Songe, you just have to close your eyes for it to happen. We live in a world of blue light which invites us to keep our eyes open, enlisting us almost in spite of ourselves in a surveillance of all by all, by infinitely multiplying modes of watching. Closing one’s eyes becomes an act of resistance. To stop seeing with the eyes in order to see with the imagination. Theatre doesn’t show us what doesn’t exist, but it exalts our imagination as a power that can transform the world. To imagine something isn’t a mere flight of fancy with no consequences, it’s a responsible act which impacts the very material of reality. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare draws a cruel and joyous portrait of that transformative power. What the characters dream of ends up happening. It may seem gentle and childish, maybe even a little ridiculous, but Pyramus kills himself for having imagined Thisbe dead, and Thisbe kills herself in turn when she finds Pyramus dead because he believed she was. No dream is pointless, even the most insignificant, or the darkest. Sometimes I dream of the end of the world, and when I wake up I find the strength to start over in a new world.
When Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, England was in the throes of conflict between Catholics and Protestants. To preserve public order, the crown banned religious subjects at the theatre. Yet it seems that faith is very much challenged by the desire of those young lovers?
By choosing to set his play in Athens before the Christian era, Shakespeare was able to dodge censorship, but the way I see it, the play is about an eminently religious question: that of faith. Faith is a form of desire, the desire for something that doesn’t exist, the desire for god. To desire is to create. To desire is an act of begetting. To believe is an act of quasi-sexual begetting with the gods. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there’s a point of contact between men and gods embodied in the character of Bottom, especially when he’s turned partly into a donkey, an animal most famous for the size of its sexual organs. With this sort of inverted centaur, with an animal’s head on a human body, Shakespeare becomes comic, ridiculous, grotesque, but also lewd, provocative, and dangerous, in the purest Dionysian tradition, which makes theatre a fertile point of contact between what exists and what doesn’t.
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach