What was the genesis of this project?
During the 2020 health crisis, together with writer Guillaume Poix, we started a new working protocol by conducting some 300 interviews with people from all walks of life in closed theatres. From those encounters, we identified what we saw as “lacks” or “insufficiencies” in the social sphere. Far from any documentary, therapeutic, or evangelical approach, I then conceived a cycle of shows using the symbolic and performative means of fiction to try to “respond” to those shortcomings through so many theatrical acts. As the third part of this cycle, Léviathan questions the French justice system, its functioning, its gaps, and its alternatives. Because it organises relationships and regulates conflicts between the members of a society, justice is the cornerstone of our social and civic framework. Yet if we all agree on its ideal and its mission, opinions differ on its application. Like other European countries, France is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of confidence in this institution.
Can you describe your working process?
From those 300 interviews, we extracted the most salient personal and political questions, with the idea that they would shape the writing of the shows. The result of many encounters we’ve had with lawyers, judges, victims, and inmates, Léviathan thus focuses on the shortcomings of institutional justice and reflects the difficulties experienced by both litigants (victims or offenders) and judicial personnel. Part of our team and I spent several weeks immersed in the 23rd chamber of the Tribunal de Paris, the criminal emergency unit where immediate appearance procedures take place. I think I personally attended thirty days of hearings.
What is immediate appearance?
It is a simplified and expedited procedure which lasts on average twenty minutes. Its purpose is to judge the presumed perpetrator of an offense after their release from police custody. Anyone can attend, the hearings are public. It is increasingly common and significantly favours incarceration, as 70% of the sentences given out are prison terms. In immediate appearance, the legal order does not function as an instance of integration and collective organisation: it is part of political conflicts and reproduces power dynamics. A defendant rarely faces their victim, but rather a prosecutor who establishes society as the victim of the offense. Which raised the following questions for me: Who do we judge? How? Is a crime defined by the penal code or by the presence of a victim? Is it the penal code which demands justice, or the injury and its reparation? Why a repressive legal system rather than a restitutive one, which would aim to repair the harm done?
Can you tell us about Leviathan—the biblical monster which gives its name to the show and constitutes its central theme?
This mythological and biblical figure has been the object of many interpretations. It is a creature we identify without truly knowing, and whose symbolic power has continuously evolved over the centuries. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, written in the 17th century, is about the transformation of the State and of sovereignty. Building on this philosophical and political legacy, the show invokes the figure of the monster to question the violence inherent in the idea of justice and reparation.
Your approach is also inspired by so-called “transformative” justice practices. What is behind that concept?
We have indeed looked into transformative justice and penal abolitionism. Those movements question the penal system as a whole—police, courts, prison—and try to imagine alternatives. The idea is to consider a true confrontation between the parties, to create the conditions for a genuine “political debate” within a courtroom where the victim and their needs would be central to considerations and decisions. As part of that process, experts may be called on to intervene, but their presence should be minimal. The goal is for civil society to reclaim the work of Justice. Léviathan aims to be a counter-space where I stage a critical investigation into our ways of considering the organisation and application of modern law, thus questioning our impulses of judgment and repression. The immediate appearance procedures written by Guillaume Poix immerse us each time into the real-time of unique stories which raise many political and social issues. But as the procedures unfold, they start disintegrating and hint at the possibility of a paradigm shift. With eight virtuosic performers, including an amateur actor who both guarantees and instigates the narrative, Léviathan attempts to overturn our certainties and to create tipping points beyond simply good and evil, forcing us to face the dilemma of violence, its legitimate exercise, and its regulation by law. Ultimately, the show asks this crucial question: who is the monster?
Can you tell us about your collaboration with Guillaume Poix?
I choose the subject before thinking about a pact—that is, the experience we will offer the audience. Then, I make proposals for a framework to Guillaume, who is present at all rehearsals. Based on our shared documentation, many stage improvisations, and his literary reflections, he then composes texts of varied nature, allowing us to confirm or invalidate our intuitions. Little by little, a skeleton of the show appears, and we refine it until it seems complete to us. We keep exchanging throughout the creative process. The very structure of the text of the play can change up until the premiere. It’s important to me to work while keeping the troupe in mind. I’ve been working with the same team for years. There is a constant dialogue with each craft, which allows us to develop a common language.
What parallels would you draw between Léviathan and Monte di Pietà, the installation you are presenting at the collection Lambert?
The Monte di Pietà installation, conceived with scenographer Anouk Maugein, is a collection of objects entrusted to us by people we met over the course of two years. In what resembles an archaeological wasteland or a sanctuary of sorrows, we also work on the idea of counter-space or heterotopia, a concept created by Foucault in 1967. Here, as with Léviathan, the wound is central because those objects represent the pain caused by the consequences of an injustice. The installation is activated by performances in which actors from the company go through the stories of those people, rewritten by Laura Vasquez. I am still collecting those kinds of objects, by the way.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach