Patrice Chéreau
Since he was a young boy, Patrice Chéreau knew that he would be in the theatre: his career did not belie his premonition. It was in 1966, with L'Affaire de la rue de Lourcine by Labiche, that the public discovered this young director, just before he became, at the age of 22, the new director of the Théâtre de Sartrouville. After this first foray into the public theatre institution, he joined the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, at the time run by Giorgio Strehler. From this encounter and the two years of intensive work that followed, a demanding approach to lighting would remain, permitting him to set off the space of the stage and the bodies pacing across it. When he returned to France in 1972, he was appointed assistant director of the Théâtre national populaire de Villeurbanne, at Roger Planchon's invitation. For nearly a decade, he would create there memorable stagings of classic as well as contemporary texts. Appointed co-director of the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in 1981, he was determined to bring the author Bernard-Marie Koltès to the attention of the public, while continuing to present the works of Heiner Müller, Chekhov and Shakespeare. Once again looking for greater freedom, he resigned in 1990 and turned towards opera - which he notably tackled in Bayreuth where he staged Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen - and towards cinema, becoming a renowned director and script-writer. Theatre, opera, cinema: in these three major arts, in "these three different languages," Patrice Chéreau recounts the same stories, the same allegories. Stories of life and death, of the living and of ghosts, of love and disaffection, of solitude and collective adventures. He considers himself above all as a craftsman serving the words of the great poets. A thoughtful and demanding director of actors, he asks them to be literally penetrated and transformed by the words, to carry theatre to its highest reaches. He came to the Festival d'Avignon in 1987 with Platonov, a work created with the students of the École de Nanterre-Amandiers, then directed in 1988 In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès and Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the Cour d'honneur.
JFP, May, 2011.