LA LETTRE is a commission from the Festival d’Avignon as part of the Pièce Commune / Volksstück project, with the aim of creating a so-called pocket repertoire.
The director of the Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, invites artists to create a play that can become part of this pocket repertoire and can be performed without specific infrastructure, in co-production with the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen), which I have been directing since 2023.
With this more modest proposal, inspired by the tradition of popular theatre, the aim is to stage performances in all kinds of non-dedicated spaces, that is, venues outside of traditional theatres: community halls, village squares, and so on. This reminds me of my earliest memories of theatre, when my family and I would go to see a play performed outdoors in a village, with a small team and minimal technical setup. I find that appealing. The idea is to create a play accessible to everyone, to make it inclusive for all audiences. I had fun playing with the idea of imagining a high-level stand-up show that doesn't rely on the conventions of bourgeois theatre. The play references certain classics of Western theatre, but it doesn’t share their length, instead cutting to the essentials in order to speak more directly to the audience.
While this play does not strictly set out to question the history of theatre, it seeks to shed light on the personal relationship its two performers have with their theatrical practice.
This show tells the story of a double obsession. On one side, there’s the obsession of the actor Arne, who wants to stage Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull because his grandmother, a star presenter on Flemish radio, was a great fan of the play. She had dreamed of playing the young Nina, or even Arkadina, the mother. Those are two of the most coveted roles in classical theatre. She passed away just as Arne was entering drama school, performing in his very first play: The Seagull.
On the other side, there’s Olga, who carries the dual heritage of a Cameroonian family and the island of Réunion, from her mother’s and grandmother’s side. Her grandmother lived in Cameroon and suffered from schizophrenia. She heard voices. She died in a fire, by accident, though no one really knows how or why. Olga herself grew up in Orléans and became fascinated with Joan of Arc, that iconic historical figure who also heard voices and was burned at the stake, and who has tragically been co-opted today as a symbol by fascist groups.
We drew dramaturgical links between these two stories. They contain incredible coincidences and reflect the obsessions of the performers: Olga’s desire to tell her grandmother’s story through the figure of Joan of Arc, and Arne’s wish to tell the story of The Seagull through the voice of his own grandmother. As is often the case in my work, the dramaturgical structure is built on several layers: a broad narrative drawn from literature, theatre, or history with a capital “H,” interwoven with more intimate elements, like the characters’ personal motivations or the biographies of the actors involved in the project.
Thus, in the play, everything constantly intertwines and echoes back and forth, until Olga becomes the figure of Nina, or Arne that of the mad priest who tries to prove that Joan of Arc did not hear the voice of God, but rather of the Devil.
These two narrative threads are interwoven with more specific reflections on theatre itself: How does one die on stage? Or, what does “popular theatre” really mean? This work aligns with the Festival’s desire to reach the outskirts of its city. Creating a play with minimal technical requirements allows it to be performed virtually anywhere, echoing the decentralisation initiative of Jean Vilar, the founder of the Festival d’Avignon in 1947. Avignon has long since become an international festival, with many highly technological productions. I enjoyed diving back into the Festival’s archival footage and discovering interviews in which actress Jeanne Moreau explains how, in the Festival’s early years, she designed her own costumes and makeup.
In a way, it’s about writing a collective history.
The writing emerged through a series of back-and-forth discussions between the performers and the directing team, with the starting point being their reflections on their relationship with theatre and the subjects that obsess them. We went through a long process before we began to glimpse the guiding thread of the piece. While each person holds within themselves a multitude of stories, the challenge is to sift through them and find the ones that resonate with each other to create a meaningful dramaturgical fabric. I set only one rule for myself in my work, namely, to always create something that emerges from “nothingness”: the goal is to find a story strong enough that we feel compelled to share it with an audience, and for that, beautiful language or the actors’ technical skill alone is not enough. The work is about exploring topics that question the blurry and inexplicable aspects of our lives, like generational conflict, death, absence, even love. Above all, it’s about forming a community in order to make theatre. That’s also why I really like the idea of involving the audience in this project; they can participate in telling the intimate alongside the grand historical narrative. Here, the audience is directly drawn into a mise en abyme, as they are watching a performance of a performance, which in turn might be a play or a burning at the stake.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant in December 2024