Editorial
Stéphane Braunschweig, May 2023
A theatre open onto the world and that tackles the issues of our time, a theatre where generations of artists are in dialogue and where women and men are given equal place: it is the vision that has been guiding me since I arrived at the Odéon, and that fully expresses itself in this new season, with the goal of supporting artists over the longer term, bringing out various aspects of their work, and following their development, all the while allowing the audience to discover new faces and new creative stances.
On the international side, this season is undeniably marked by the presence of two major Polish artists. The great Krystian Lupa comes back to the Odéon with his French adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. For those who know the hypnotic quality of the German writer’s style, it is clear that it has everything needed to give Lupa inspiration to create a fascinating theatrical event, one of those he creates when he combines the scaffolding of great literature with the inner landscapes of his creative actors. Łukas Twarkowski, his young fellow countryman, has worked for years with Lupa as a dramaturg and video artist. For some ten years he has mounted, in Poland and in the Baltic states, particularly spectacular and ambitious total theatrical events, but this is the first time that his work will be presented in France. Rohtko (with a deliberate mistake!), first done in Latvia with Latvian, Polish and Chinese artists, is built on the life of the great American painter Mark Rothko as well as on a spectacular counterfeit scandal that upset the art world some twelve years ago. In the era of digital art and "crypto art," the iconoclastic show probes the issues of the commercialization of art, the myth of authenticity, and the hierarchy between the original and the copy.
This issue of reality’s loss of value — of its diffraction into millions of images and experiences — is also at the heart of Angela [a strange loop], by the German artist Susanna Kennedy, whose work will be presented for the first time at the Odéon. What really constitutes the identity of Angela, a woman whose life we follow from birth to death, and whom we watch going through the existential experience of illness? What is "me" in a world where the new connections between body, machines and technologies undermine the very notion of subjectivity? These are the fascinating questions that Susanne Kennedy asks, in collaboration with the multimedia artist Markus Selg.
It is also a woman’s life that Alexander Zeldin follows in his new English-language show, The Confessions: the story of his own mother, whose intimacy he interweaves with the major societal changes, and in particular the trajectory of women, of the past eighty years. Zeldin’s social concern, that we discovered in Love, then in Faith, Hope and Charity, opens here onto a clearly autobiographical dimension that was already perceptible in A Death in the Family.
Women are also at the heart of Christiane Jatahy’s new show, performed in French, in which Hamlet will be played by an actress so as to bring out the violence of the patriarchal system. After revisiting Macbeth in 2016 in her installation-performance A Floresta que anda, the director returns to Shakespeare, firmly determined to tackle his most famous play head on. Shakespeare’s text will be performed, but with an audacious dramaturgical slant that should make the audience hear it as if for the first time.
And eight women yet again, eight performers of African descent, blow up in Carte noire nommée désir the (non-decolonized) fantasies attached to their bodies so as to reclaim their stories as Black women. Created in 2022, it struck us as important to present this powerfully poetic and vital show by Rébecca Chaillon.
In front of all these women, the mythical seducer that Macha Makeïeff puts on the stage, reading Molière’s Dom Juan through the prism of the Marquis de Sade, will probably feel quite lonely… With her female sensibility and her sense of laughter, Macha Makeïeff pits against "the one who thrives on being evil" an Elvira who rebels against the humiliating destiny to which a man’s desire tries to reduce her.
The way History weaves through people’s lives, what it does to individual human beings, whom it sometimes carries like waves, and sometimes smashes against rocks, is probably one of the greatest theatrical issues, which is most fascinating when it connects the small to the large, the singular to the universal, the intimate to the collective.
That is what can be found in the lives of the Emigrants in the wonderful novel by Sebald, himself exiled from post-war Germany, whose work was haunted by the ghosts of Nazism, but also — in a farcical, frightful mode — in the lives of the French far right figures during World War II that Sylvain Creuzevault brings to life in his new show Edelweiss [France Fascisme].
At a time when an apparently normalized far right is on the threshold of government, it is probably wise to go back to the sources of its nationalist and xenophobic ideology.
It is also found in Genet’s Les Paravents (The Screens) that Arthur Nauzyciel brings back onto the stage of the Odéon almost 60 years after the violence and the calls to censorship that surrounded its initial staging by Roger Blin. In 1966, the defenders of freedom of expression thankfully won the battle of the Paravents against the advocates for French Algeria. At the time, the wounds of the Algerian War were still bleeding, but have they really healed? Have they not been pushed down to the bottom of French society, and are they not always ready to resurface?
That is also what sparked my desire to stage Racine’s Andromaque. When I think about the war in Ukraine, beyond the awfulness of the fighting and abominable destruction, I cannot help but think about the traces that the war will leave in people’s wounded flesh and souls, about the wounds that will take generations to heal, about the vicious circle that adds hatred to hatred, about the traumatized children who are likely to carry on with violence and reproduce these traumas themselves. In Iphigénie Racine set the stage at the beginning of the Trojan War; he reminded us of its origins and linked them to the hunger for power of Greek kings, to their willingness to sacrifice human values on the altar of their desire for glory. When we performed the play in 2020 these issues resonated with the stoppage of the world caused by the Covid 19 epidemic. In Andromaque, Racine sets the stage at the end of the Trojan War, in its aftermath. The sacrifice of a child is yet again at the centre of an interweaving of interests and desires, of emotional and political issues, this time integral to the post-traumatic state that all characters, winners and losers, henchmen and victims, find themselves in after the war. To escape hate and the chain of revenge, to break away from a past that compromises both the present and the future, to step out of History, to step out of tragedy - is it even remotely possible?
On a much more intimate level, these issues are also central to the works of Arne Lyre, Stig Dagerman and Thomas Bernhard. In Jours de joie, the extraordinary play by Arne Lygre that we are remounting this season, the Norwegian author questions, with scathing humor, our capacity to be happy, to surmount tragic situations, and to find joy "in spite of it all." L’Enfant brûlé (A Burnt Child), the penultimate novel from the Swedish author Stig Dagerman (more known in France for his work Notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier (Our Need for Consolation )) deals with surviving after a mother is gone, and for the director Noëmie Ksicova, it is about making theatre "a space for consolation and reparation." We can count on this newcomer to the Odéon, who is also a musician and an author, to scrutinize with keen sensitivity Dagerman’s music of the souls.
With Oui (Yes), Célie Pauthe and Claude Duparfait return to Thomas Bernhard, to his work full of anger and failures, this time to embark with him, in this brief short story, on a quest for the "vital being » — a dream, no doubt, embedded in the powerful and yet improbable encounter between two lonely beings.
Finally, after the success of her Némésis, inspired by Philip Roth, we are delighted to remount La réponse des Hommes (The Human Response), the magnificent show written and directed by Tiphaine Raffier that we had to cancel in 2021 and reprogrammed outside of the theatre with the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in 2022. With its nine stories animated by an epic and dystopian spirit, Tiphaine Raffier turns the stage into a space in which our contemporary realities are pitted against the most fundamental ethical questions. It is at the same time exhilarating and distressing. And it is akin to the Odéon’s artistic project, which seeks to combine the pleasure of theatre, of playing, of inventing, of imagination, with the artists’ sharp outlook on the world as it is.