ARTS
A very French affair
Harry Eyres finds this year's Avignon Theatre Festival stylish, serious and surprising Kafka has a particularly resonant para- ble about leopards breaking into a temple and drinking up the contents of the sacrifi- cial pitchers. Eventually the intrusion can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony. Theatre festivals, I was reflecting last month at Avignon, can turn out a bit like such leopards, starting off fierce and potentially disruptive, ending up safely institutionalised. Eventually, one presumes, leopards lose their teeth (if not their spots).
Avignon is the French Edinburgh. It's exactly the same age (50th anniversary this year) but not quite so big (only 520 produc- tions as opposed to Edinburgh's 1,000 plus). Where Edinburgh is exotically international, Avignon remains single- mindedly French, or francophone. There is healthy representation from French-speak- ing Africa but only a handful of produc- tions in English.
Also dauntingly French is the style, indeed the chic, of this summer festival in the white stone mediaeval city. People wear less, much less than in Edinburgh, but with infinitely more grace. The temperature hovers around 90 as opposed to 60 — but how is it that the French, French women especially, don't sweat? In Edinburgh peo- ple move fast — you have to if you want to keep warm, or need to make it from the Assembly Rooms in the New Town to the Traverse in the Old in 15 minutes flat. In Avignon they glide, resting frequently at cafes, and indeed eating rather seriously at some of the best restaurants in southern France (if you want to disprove reports of the demise of French cuisine, just try le Bain Marie in rue Petramale or L'Ile Son- nante behind Place de l'Horloge).
I don't mean to suggest that Avignon is a fashion parade or pretext for gastronomic excess. The Festival remains dedicated as it has always been to 'serious art theatre, not theatre as entertainment', in the words of the Festival director, Bernard Faivre d'Arcier. Opportunities for debat — a great feature of French theatre is pre- and post- performance discussion — are endless. You could easily spend entire days attend- ing conferences rather than seeing plays.
This 50th Festival, which opened to the snarl of Maurice Jarre's trumpets and the roar of a wickedly unseasonable mistral, has in some ways looked back to the first. In 1947, Jean Viler, the great post-war gal- vaniser of French theatre, set up a stage in the Cour d'Honneur of the Palais des Papes and played Richard II, pitting the jewelled imagery of Shakespeare's most mediaeval play against the 700-year-old stone of the mountainous fortress-palace. Forty-nine years later, Alain Francon has chosen to echo that seminal production with another stripped-down view of an English history play — this time not Shake- speare but Marlowe's Edward II.
You can see how the idea might work indeed might be brilliantly apposite, span- ning the last half-century from a tragic, humanistic revival of European culture out of the debris of war to a nihilistic, post- modernist condition in which, as Octavio Paz has recently written, 'the notion of the person, the human being, has become blurred'. The high blind arches of the courtyard walls can seldom have seemed grimmer than in this production, where everything from the beginning is already moving towards the brutal conclusion. Francon says he is more interested in paint- ing than in theatre, and by setting isolated, histrionic figures against movable burnished metal screens he evokes both Velazquez and Bacon. Carlo Brandt's king is the Bacon figure, an overgrown baby curling like a foetus, then skipping across the stage, deliberately flouting decorum at every turn, showing the unbearable nakedness of desire. All this is admirable but the production has been coldly received, even described as 'tot flop'. Even more distressing than the last scenes of gruesome regicide was the pain registered on Carlo Brandt's features as he saw the audience unceremoniously departing with minimal applause. I think Marlowe has got to take some of the blame. In a clear, bare translation the play is boiled down to a dark pageant. Only the King, and to a lesser extent his coldly sen- sual minion Gaveston, give signs of multi- dimensional life. Other characters simply move the story along. But a more disturb- ing thought is that we the audience are not up to it, not capable of sitting through three and a half hours of serious theatre (without an interval, incidentally). Jean Vilar spoke of an 'open-air theatre where public and spectators will be united in a single communion'. The main communion here was one of boredom.
Of the performances I saw, much the most enjoyable was the least pretentious Philippe Avron's one-man show of an actor's reminiscences and reflections, Ma Cour D'Honneur. Avron has worked with such directors as Vilar, Mnouchkine and Peter Brook, hardly ever in the lead, doing stalwart work in secondary roles. He is extremely charming and develops instant complicite with the audience. But inter- spersed with gentle humour (imitations of Brook speaking French and a Tati-like rou- tine of a romantic postman) are deceptively shrewd observations and, this being France, bits of philosophy (Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Montaigne). Vilar wanted to create a pop- ular theatre (he later founded the Theatre Populaire du Chaillot in Paris): nowadays, as Avron remarked, the words die on peo- ple's lips. He also spoke of television's effect on audiences, stuck to their seats but unresponsive.
There are words which circulate round a festival, and this year one has been nostal- gia. The nostalgia I sensed was for a time when a theatre festival felt like an event. Much of this has to do with size. The first festival featured only three productions. Today's mega-festivals can seem more like trade fairs than theatrical happenings. The one official 'happening', entitled Champ d'Experiences Troisieme, a stranded play- ground in a building site, had the rather sad air of orphaned avant-garde.
A feature of both Avignon and Edin- burgh, of course, is the split between offi- cial Festival and Fringe, with the Fringe, or 'Off in Avignon, events vastly outnumber- ing the official ones. Such a split is no doubt inevitable, reflecting fragmentation and pluralism, but I wonder if it is not also impoverishing. Official theatre acquires a certain stiffness, or stuffiness (many mem- bers of the audience appearing to be pay- ing cultural dues rather than enjoying themselves) while Fringe or Off attracts .a certain type of determined enthusiast, M the trainspotting or Dirdwatching mode.
Such gripings are probably just reactions to overload. Le 'Off is full of life and com- mitted young performers, who spend the time they're not on stage going round the town with flyers and, if you're lucky, free snippets. Above all the Festival is about unexpected encounters (with a Polish accordion quartet, a Mongolian lutenist, a girl writing letters in meadow-green ink) against the background of the stone city which can seem lifeless at other times, but whose squares and streets acquire a Xanadu-like magic every July and early August. Surely somewhere a new genera- tion of thirsty leopards is waiting to pounce.
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