Claude Régy
An avid reader of the greatest contemporary playwrights, Claude Régy is a director whose insatiable curiosity is only rivaled by his fierce determination to find the most challenging theatrical forms in order to make the voices of the poets heard. With his company, Les Ateliers contemporains, he has introduced many to Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Harold Piner, Edward Bond, Peter Handke, Botho Strauss, Jon Fosse, Arne Lygre, Fernando Pessoa, Tarjei Vesaas, and Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Interior he directed in 1985, followed by The Death of Tintagiles in 1996. This love for the text is accompanied by a desire to always dig deeper into forms and meaning, to let his actors be haunted by the word in order to better convey its truth. A practitioner of drama as a ceremonial, a strong believer in the power of silence, a builder of spaces of representation in which lights tend towards purity, Claude Régy has long become a master of his craft. He has directed over sixty plays, an illustration of this permanent state of research without which he argues theatre would be but lifeless. By trying to “shift the thresholds of perception, as much for the ear as for the eye,” he hopes to share his work ethics with the audience, asking them to pay close attention so that they can truly hear the words and see the gestures of the actors.
JFP, April 2014
