Éric Lacascade is a troupe leader who loves collective work. Co-founder of the Ballatum Théâtre with Guy Alloucherie, he has always kept a team of actors with him, and especially since he was appointed to head the Centre Dramatique National de Normandie in 1997 where he created an actors' cooperative, something unique then in French theatre.
Through Grotowski and the works of Guy Debord, he developed a distinct taste for research work which he considers indispensable prior to starting to direct any play. The basis of his work consists in delving into the world of authors such as Chekhov whom he has visited several times (Ivanov, The Seagull, Family Circle for Three Sisters, Platonov) and also Racine, Eugène Durif and Claudel (from whose works he wrote his show called A la vie, à la Mort, (To Life, To Death) as well as Marivaux and Pasolini. Urged on by the troupe's energy and enthusiasm, he offers productions where the actors' physical commitment and rigorous work bring out the stories that the big dramatic poets have invented, developing a unique and fastidious art of narration. This crew has already taken on the challenge of the Courtyard of Honour with a magnificent production of Platonov where the Popes' Palace was turned into a huge Russian country estate. The spectator was not aware of the hard work and the research, only the magic.
At the Avignon Festival, Éric Lacascade has already led a work-shop on William Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, with Groupe 30 from the École Dramatique Supérieure du Théâtre National de Strasbourg, as well as a Chekhov trilogy Family Circle for Three Sisters, Ivanov and The Seagull in 2000, Sonnets in 2001 and
Platonov in 2002.
After a long time in the company of Anton Chekhov – Ivanov, The Seagull, Family Circle for Three Sisters and Platonov – Éric Lacascade is directing Les Barbares (The Barbarians) by Gorki and so tells the tale of what might have been a sequel to the adventures of Chekhov's heroes, a sort of ‘Platonov, Twenty Years On'.
In this rarely performed work Gorki invents two engineers who are to build a railway line in a province in the outback of the Russian Empire, in a town where nothing is likely to happen. Their mere presence is enough to cause turmoil in this small, confined world, a place caught in the past , and which, quite suddenly and brutally, is confronted with the social and economic change causing upheaval in Russia.
A daily menu of meanness, humiliation and petty abuse of power of all kind come to the surface.
Gorki's dramatic construction is a fresco made out of layers of interwoven little stories telling this often empty daily life of unsatisfied desire, of people who would like to see change but who are scared of it causing havoc and upsetting their reassuring daily routine. This play moves on from a longing for the old world felt by Chekhov's protagonists, and leaps into the new world, the world of the ‘barbarians'. Petits-bourgeois,
students and the intellectual elite without causes and without a future, all the people who have lost their status, but also engineers from outside promising an exciting future, all of them could be considered as barbarians in this pre-revolutionary Russia in 1905 which Gorki describes in a sombre way.
No more nostalgia, no more apologies, instead a patent observation of reality because, as Gorki said, “the carriage of the past takes us nowhere”.
Assembling his actors' collective who already played in his Platonov with proven commitment,
Éric Lacascade wants to express the power of Gorki's writing through the many voices in this chorus of characters.
Gorki involved in the political struggle for a better world, Gorki the Revolutionary, but still independent, Gorki whose entire body of work is a forceful account of that society which bullied and crushed its weakest members. Gorki is an author to whom Éric Lacascade can feel close, having always combined his own artistic work with the concerns of the people of his time.
Jean-François Perrier
Distribution
adaptation et mise en scène : Éric Lacascade
adaptation d'après la traduction de : André Markowic
avec : Jérôme Bidaux, Jean Boissery, Fanny Catel-Chanet, Arnaud Chéron, Arnaud Churin, Gilles Defacque, Alain D'Haeyer, Pascal Dickens, Frédérique Duchêne, David Fauvel, Christophe Grégoire, Evelyne Istria, Stéphane Jais, Éric Lacascade, Christelle Legroux, Daria Lippi, Millaray Lobos, Grégori Miege, Arzela Prunennec, Virginie Vaillant
dramaturgie : Vladimir Petkov
scénographie : Philippe Marioge
lumières : Philippe Berthomé
costumes : Margot Bordat
son : Frédéric Deslias
collaborateurs artistique : Daria Lippi, David Bobée, Thomas Ferrand
décor réalisé par : l'Atelier du CDN de Normandie
Production
Production : Centre dramatique national de Normandie-Comédie de Caen
Coproduction : Festival d'Avignon, Automne en Normandie, Les Célestins-Théâtre de Lyon
avec le soutien : du Conseil régional de Basse-Normandie et du Conseil général du Calvados ° avec la complicité :du Prato, Théâtre international de Quartier-Lille
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production