In what way are Euripides and his tragedy Hecuba a source of inspiration for you today?
It starts with the language. I’ve worked before on so-called classical authors for plays that weren’t always meant to be reinterpretations. I wanted to work on this specific style, at once clear and powerful. To use those words, those sentences written twenty-five centuries ago. With Hecuba, Euripides created a sort of breach in classical tragedy. For the first time, he gives us to hear the inner life of the characters, creating a sensitive portrait based on their feelings. He might be the very first author who conceived of and allowed for a psychological reading of the protagonists. In a way, it was revolutionary.
At the heart of Euripides’s tragedy, the mythological figure of Hecuba remains little known. Who is she?
The queen of Troy enslaved after the fall of her city, Hecuba sees her children used as spoils of war and split between the victors. When her last son, given to the king of Thrace, is found murdered—his body left unburied—she orchestrates her vengeance, then presents her case to Agamemnon… A wounded woman demanding justice, Hecuba is also a political symbol. It’s a dimension I’ve always found fascinating, and it reaches its paroxysm in a play about how society takes vulnerability into account. This text is first and foremost a powerful material which allows to tackle the question of representation in theatre, of its public dimension.
Your tragedy—which you’ve called Hécube, pas Hécube (Hecuba, not Hecuba)—is based on a social reality?
When I decide to rewrite a play, I’m used to working with various texts and documents. My version of Antony and Cleopatra in 2014 was influenced as much by William Shakespeare as by Plutarch, by my various readings as well as by my vision of theatre… I don’t think my process is in any way different from that of ancient authors: their plays are actualisations of myths and stories that predated them. For a few years now, I’ve been writing texts. Not doing adaptations. I ask myself how to arrive at the work I’ve chosen after a long detour. When I created The Way She Dies in 2017—in collaboration with the Belgian company Tg sTAN—I based it on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the end result being a play which exists between the lines of the novel: a play about the lives of two couples, upset by their reading of Anna Karenina. This way of working probably comes from the trust I have in theatre. From the role theatre can play in our lives. In Hécube pas Hécube, the spectators are witness to the personal, intimate, and familial tragedy which strikes Nadia, whose autistic son was abused within the very institution that was supposed to take care of him: a story inspired by real events which caused an uproar in Switzerland, and which I followed closely when I worked in Geneva. I read a lot about it, from medical literature to witness testimonies and news stories… So many sources I then turned into fiction and poetry.
How does Nadia’s story collide with Hecuba’s legend?
I felt how Nadia’s tragedy, like that of all struggling mothers, echoed that of Hecuba. I used many fragments from the play, especially in the second part. For instance, I kept Hecuba’s long plea to Agamemnon, a scene in which she claims to understand that the sacrifice of her son was an unavoidable tragedy, a convention of war which applies to the vanquished. However, what she cannot accept is that her son was killed by a friend, an ally who owed her hospitality and assistance. She turns her pain into fuel to fight and denounce what we would today call a “crime against Humanity.” She’s arguing for a sort of proto-Geneva Convention. She thinks that the Laws and values of mankind are above the will of the gods. It’s the political aspect of the relationship to the Law which I find interesting. When Nadia uses Hecuba’s words, she does so to denounce a crime that touches her but which is bigger than her own thoughts and words: here, the abuse of vulnerable children. The same way parents expect the State, on which they depend, to intervene to create medical and educational structures needed for adequate living conditions. Nadia revolts against an authority that considers itself above the Law.
The parallel between the figure of Hecuba and the character of Nadia impacts and unsettles the chronology and perception of the tragedy. Can you tell us more about your use of flashbacks?
At the beginning, everything is clear for the audience and the actors. The audience is here to see a show about Nadia. Nadia is an actress who rehearses during the day but is also a mother going through a personal tragedy. Over time, it becomes more and more difficult for Nadia to tell the difference between her own tragedy and Hecuba’s. The words she says at work start encroaching on her daily life, which is punctuated by criminal investigations. Just like in rehearsals—when I decide to start by the ending, for instance—natural time, for Nadia, disappears, stops being linear: it stretches and contracts, moves from past to present, becomes maze-like. The play bends towards a resolution no one expects. That confusion gives it a tragic dimension. Dramaturgically-speaking, the role played by Elsa Lepoivre—playing Nadia playing Hecuba—is double. And this confusion becomes evident when Nadia starts to identify gestures and behaviours she attributes to Euripides’s characters in her own daily life. She is the only protagonist of the show per se. She’s the one we follow. It is through her that we experience the tragedy. The other actors of the Comédie-Française all play two roles because in Nadia’s eyes, they shift from one story to the other. People and characters merge—that’s what the chorus sees. We’re halfway between two worlds.
If Nadia’s vision blur, it’s also the case for that of the audience: thanks to the lighting—among other things—with its unique tonality…
The colour palette has been reduced to that of a dog’s vision: shades of yellow and blue-purple. In mythology, the goddess Hera transformed Hecuba into a dog for daring to resist Agamemnon. In a way, for me, Hecuba’s fight is similar to that of a rabid dog. She won’t let go, she is driven by a fury that will not die until her son has been saved. This determined anger, almost animal in nature, reminds me of that of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, under the dictatorship. There is an important parallel to draw between Hecuba’s grief and her demand for justice on the one hand, and the circumstances of History on the other. The grief of mothers caused by totalitarian regimes or by the collective negligence of a society was a great source of inspiration. I wonder what we do to collectively defend democratic values and protect the most vulnerable among us.
How did the actresses and actors of the Comédie-Française react to this meta-theatrical proposition which weaves fiction and reality? How did you work with them?
A show is always an act of collective writing, created in close collaboration with the entire artistic team, first and foremost with the actresses and actors. In that sense, my writing is collaborative, but it isn’t based on improvisation. On the first day of rehearsal, I gave everyone a dozen pages which covered moments I saw as important. There was no scene to learn, no analysis to provide, no answer to give. We essentially talked about a text and of the outline of a character, neither of which existed yet. Like children, we imagined the roles, the scenes, the text, the language, the way we could play it. They all read and re-read, everyone made suggestions, and I took notes. Our discussions, our dreams, my drafts, all this accumulated material in my memory allowed me to write with the interpretation and direction in mind. When an actor reads Shakespeare or Molière, he rewrites or translates Shakespeare or Molière. It’s an exercise in imagination. The life of theatre artists is filled with their lived experience. There is a porosity between actors and actresses, their lives, and their interpretation of the words they’re performing. And perhaps that porosity means that this fictional story touched them in a most personal way. Tackling those subjects with that troupe and writing for those actresses and actors in French has been one of the most beautiful adventures in my artistic life.
Interview conducted in February 2024 and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach