How did you discover Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra?
I came across it while doing research on the myth of Electra. I initially planned to stage the tragedy of Electra in the versions by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, since the myth runs through the works of all three playwrights. In a way, I wanted to set them in competition with one another, bearing in mind that these authors were often in rivalry in their own time. But the project gradually evolved and led me to this text which I fell in love with at first sight, and I decided to trust that instinct, which I rarely do.
What was it in the work that sparked that instant connection?
It’s the conflicts within the family that the play brings to life. There’s the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, and the daughter’s lover, who is also the mother’s lover. I like the way O’Neill writes about the strained, conflict-ridden relationships between these characters. As it happens, ever since I started doing theatre, from my earliest experiences in secondary school, what has always drawn me most are those moments of crisis, those scenes of conflict. With O’Neill, I’m spoiled, because there are so many of them. These scenes were my gateway into the work. It’s a rewriting of The Oresteia, with the murder of Agamemnon, the revenge that follows against his wife and her lover, and the emergence of the concept of justice. It’s a trilogy: Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. I also like the closeness in English between the words “mourning” and “morning”: it’s as if, within grief, there were the promise of a dawn, of a rebirth. Without falling into a Christian view that would justify suffering as a condition for accessing paradise, mourning is seen instead as the threshold of a world to come: it has a transformative dimension.
Could you tell us more about the world in which O’Neill sets his adaptation?
He transposes the myth to the aftermath of the Civil War, in the context of the abolition of slavery, which would become a founding event in what the United States is today. You know, when Donald Trump was re-elected, some commentators saw it as a backlash following the struggle for minority rights: this idea that society is somehow “paying” for having gone too far in progressivism. That’s of course completely absurd, but the history of that country is shaped by this kind of imagination: struggles for rights followed by violent reactions. O’Neill was writing in 1931, about fifteen years after The Birth of a Nation, that dystopian, supremacist film which revisits the Civil War by portraying enslaved people as a savage horde and the Ku Klux Klan as a kind of Christ-like liberating army of the nation. It was this film that enabled the reconstitution of the Ku Klux Klan, which had previously disappeared. That’s how, in O’Neill’s play, I see Lavinia (Electra) and Orin (Orestes): to me, they foreshadow the world to come.
Is this the first time you’ve staged a playwright from the American repertoire?
Yes. It’s strange, but in my mind, I place him alongside August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which I’ve staged and which feels similar in its ferocity of language and the underlying violence contained within the words. Eugene O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He influenced Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. It’s a body of work that I instinctively connect to classic American cinema, to films starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. I’m very drawn to the fragility of the characters they portray: they are both weak and sublime.
Does working on this American repertoire and its relationship to character psychology shift the way you approach plays?
O’Neill writes under the influence of his discovery of psychoanalysis, which fascinated him. The stage directions occupy a significant place in the text. They indicate not only gestures but also performance intentions, addresses and glances, even breathlessness. This way of writing characters’ psychology is something I find deeply compelling. It is very different from everything I have worked on so far. I don’t yet know how I will make use of it. I imagine three parts of around forty minutes each, relatively distinct and independent. I like this principle of display. I am not trying to force connections. There are many characters, and I have six actors and actresses. Each performer will therefore be required to take on multiple roles. As always, I work in the dark, without premeditation; I launch myself into the text in the hope that it will reveal something to us.
How does this new production fit into the project you have been developing over the past four years at the Festival—Démonter les remparts pour finir le pont?
In effect, when I work on a production, I don’t feel like I am staging plays so much as dismantling them, point by point, in order to question them, to confront the “wall” of the text: that wall of incomprehension asserted by a text in the material reality of its black ink on the white page. The bridge is the Pont d’Avignon: an unfinished bridge, a bridge toward absence, one that connects us to what does not yet exist. The bridge must not be completed, because that would be like building a tomb. It would be the opposite of mourning.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in February 26