As part of the Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont (Dismantling the Walls to Finish Building the Bridge) project, which has you partnering with the Festival d’Avignon for four years, you are presenting The Persians. Why did you choose to stage this play by Aeschylus, considered one of the oldest in European theatre?
This choice was the result of a discussion with Tiago Rodrigues. It’s a short, hieratic play, a single block of text, which greatly appeals to me. There are no plot twists or reversals. It is an inexorable and relentless tragedy. It takes place after the Battle of Salamis, in which the Persians were defeated by the Greeks, a battle in which Aeschylus himself took part. King Xerxes returns defeated to Susa, the capital of his empire, and faces the consequences of his loss. The play is doubly original in that it adopts the perspective of the losers of history and of the enemy, since it was performed in Greece before an Athenian audience. Against all expectations, Aeschylus delivers a tragedy that glorifies the vanquished. When, at the end, Xerxes urges the chorus to weep and cry out in pain, it’s as if Aeschylus is calling on the spectators to allow themselves to be overtaken by sadness and empathy, to shed tears for those they have destroyed.
One often hears about the political function of Greek tragedy. What, in your opinion, is Aeschylus saying to us through this chant full of empathy?
It is a startling way to turn triumphalism on its head. Aeschylus reminds us that every war brings its share of deaths and destruction, and that the defeat of the other is also our own. He tells us that history, which everyone knows is written by the victors, must also take the vanquished into account. In a way, he holds the Greeks accountable, as if telling them: “After the war and the massacres, we will have to write a shared history, and what divided us must become the very material of that history.” Ultimately, this is the fundamental principle of tragedy: catastrophe becomes the foundation of a community, of a society to come.
In Aeschylus’s theatre, catharsis also occurs through dialogue with the dead…
Yes, there is a striking scene that fascinated audiences at the time. In it, the ghost of Xerxes’s father, the former king Darius, rises from the grave to berate the living and reproach his son for his excessive pride. Aeschylus manages to walk a fine line, taking the side neither of the Greeks nor of the Persians, without ever falling into revenge or hatred. The play resonates with our programme, now in its third year.
How does Aeschylus’s play resonate with Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont?
Because in the title we chose, the word is dismantling, not destroying: to use what separates us to connect to one another. It is the same with Aeschylus, who asks how to build the future on what has been destroyed, how to find in the ruins the cornerstone of our shared history.
How will The Persians be part of that programme?
Every year as part of this programme, I conduct a workshop in the weeks leading up to rehearsals which I call Venez m’aider à faire du théâtre (Come Help Me Make Theatre). It’s an invitation to which both professional and non-professional actors respond with great generosity, and it is undoubtedly the most beautiful part of this adventure…
You have a long history with the Greek tragedians. About ten years ago, you notably staged what you called The July Tragedies, bringing together three plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. What, within this trio, makes Aeschylus unique?
Aeschylus is certainly the most archaic and mysterious. He maintains a strong connection to current events, whereas Euripides and Sophocles draw on a more mythological and fictional inspiration. He wrote The Persians only eight years after the Battle of Salamis. It is almost a documentary play. It is possible that some spectators had participated in that war. It is possible that it had cost the lives of members of their families. The audience came to the theatre burdened with this weight, passing through a city still bearing the scars of that victory. This is how The Persians must resonate today. I don’t usually make explicit links between plays and current events, but in this case, current events resonate powerfully with the play.
Aeschylus’s plays are known for their lack of action: the tragedy is contained within the language…
In Aeschylus, the main character of the play is language itself. In The Persians, the violence inflicted on this people is also inflicted on language itself. At the beginning of the play, the language is structured, established, confident. It gradually bends under the assaults of tragedy. We witness its disintegration until, in the end, it becomes a series of chilling cries uttered by Xerxes. This is what must be conveyed, this is what must be passed on to the audience.
As a director, your work is characterised by a visceral relationship to the text. You say that you refuse to dilute the language in theatrical illusion. Is this still your guiding principle in approaching The Persians?
Yes, because this transformation of language, this collapse of speech that I observe in Aeschylus, speaks to our current world. From the breakdown of negotiations in the Oval Office to the rewriting of history that turns perpetrators into victims and victims into perpetrators, the catastrophe we are living through today is also a defeat of language and words. And this defeat is dizzying.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in March 2025