At Avignon Festival, Lots of Imagination on Show, but Few Women

AVIGNON, France — The biggest productions of the 2018 Avignon Festival did not skimp on dramatics. Thomas Jolly presented a mythological king who feeds his brother his own sons; Milo Rau recreated the murder of a gay man in Belgium in 2012; and festival director Olivier Py cast three men in turn as violent prison inmates, as poets and as coldblooded bankers.

Amid the boundary-pushing moments, there was one glaring omission: women, both as directors and as protagonists. The lack of parity in French theater is nothing new, but Py unwittingly drew attention to his own blind spots with the overall theme he selected for this edition of the Avignon Festival: “Gender.”

Out of 28 directors or collectives in the theater division, there were just seven women in the lineup at Avignon, the most important event in the French theater calendar. Three of them were credited in tandem with a man; two presented their work in the small Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, a venue Py has set aside for family-friendly productions.

Carole Thibaut, an experienced director who is at the helm of a National Dramatic Center in Montluçon, summed it up in an impassioned speech, her anger as potent as any of the stage performances on show. She was appearing as a guest during a series of daily performances and lectures directed by David Bobée that took place in the Ceccano Garden in Avignon and were called “Mesdames, Messieurs et le Reste du Monde” (“Ladies, Gentlemen and the Rest of the World”).

One of the episodes of that series was billed as a mock staging of a “nonracist, nongendered Molière Awards ceremony,” referring to France’s biggest theater prizes. Alongside transgender director Phia Ménard, Thibaut was given one of the imaginary awards. For women, the Cour d’Honneur (the most prestigious stage at Avignon) and the Molières are not available, she said in her “acceptance speech,” rattling off the statistics for this year’s festival. “I’m tired of being a nice pal to nice men who have female friends and question the notion of gender while nothing changes,” she added.

In the event, productions by women during the early part of the festival, which runs through July 24, met with muted receptions. Inês Barahona of Portugal, in collaboration with Miguel Fragata, directed the first youth-oriented production at the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, “Au-Delà de la Forêt, le Monde” (“Beyond the Forest, the World”). Performed in French by a dynamic duo, Emilie Caen and Anne-Elodie Sorlin, it retraced with clarity and empathy the journey of a young Afghan boy from his war-ravaged home to Britain. Chloé Dabert, however, did not fare quite so well in the open-air Cloître des Carmes. Dabert, who was appointed last month to the helm of the Comédie de Reims, specializes in contemporary theater, but here she elected to stage her first classical tragedy, Racine’s “Iphigénie.” Inspired by the mythological tale of a Greek princess, whose sacrifice to appease the gods ahead of the Trojan War is narrowly avoided, this 1674 play is unforgiving of slack diction and overexaggerated acting. Despite some high points, there was too much of both, with an especially dispiriting effort by Yann Boudaud, who went to battle with Racine’s consonants in his role as Agamemnon.

Elsewhere, the biggest trend in Avignon this summer seemed to be documentary theater — with mixed results. As effective as real stories can be, raw testimonies presented with little commentary are no substitute for dramaturgy.

Gurshad Shaheman’s “Il Pourra Toujours Dire que C’est Pour l’Amour du Prophète” (“He Can Always Say It Was for the Love of the Prophet”) felt exploitative: As told by actors, its string of harrowing accounts, mostly of LGBTQ refugees from the Middle East, demanded our horrified sympathy yet went nowhere with it.

A much better example of confessional performance was Didier Ruiz’s “TRANS (més enllà),” or “TRANS (Beyond),” presented at the Gymnase du Lycée Mistral. Ruiz has nearly two decades of experience in bringing nonprofessionals to the stage, and it shows in the gentle, assured editing of this production, which weaves together the personal stories of seven transgender men and women, ages 22 to 60. All of them looked at ease as they shared experiences both dark and light, alone or in groups. While it was more documentary than theater, “TRANS (més enllà)” acted as a tribute to a still-marginalized group, and was one of the unqualified successes of the festival’s “Gender” theme.

The production that dominated conversations in Avignon, however, took a true murder and turned it into layered, carefully calibrated theater. Rau, the Swiss-born director of the Belgian theater NTGent, is no stranger to laying bare the banality of evil, with past works inspired by wartime atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo or by Belgian child molester and murderer Marc Dutroux.

Rau’s production, “La Reprise — Histoire(s) du Théâtre (I),” takes its time with the story of Ihsane Jarfi, a young gay man who was tortured and beaten to death by four strangers in Liège, Belgium, in 2012. For the first hour, Rau recreates the team’s research into the events and the process of casting the production, which includes two Liège-based amateurs. Live film is used to alternate between verisimilar reinvention and commentary, both about the case and the delicate process of turning it into stage material. Credit must go to the extraordinary cast, especially the amateurs who blended in seamlessly: Suzy Cocco is heart-rending as Ihsane’s mother, while Fabian Leenders, a warehouse agent, delivers with subtlety as one of the killers. When Rau finally recreated the crime itself, for all its savagery, it didn’t feel gratuitous: By this point, the audience had enough critical context to process it.

The doom and gloom onstage extended to the fiction offerings. Py presented his latest creation, “Pur Présent” (“Pure Present”), in La Scierie, a new venue just outside the walls of Avignon. This trilogy of short plays for three actors is a chamber effort by the standards of Py, a French director, but it fits neatly in his oeuvre. In many ways, Py has picked up in French theater where Paul Claudel and Jean Genet left off: His Christian-influenced brand of mysticism divides the world between the saintly and the cynical. His style is often bombastic, yet at its best, as in the first part of “Pur Présent,” in which a prison ringleader breaks down an angelic new prisoner, it lends characters a real flamboyance. While restraint is not Py’s forte, this “huis clos” would work just as well without the other two parts, although the actors (Nâzim Boudjenah, Dali Benssalah and Joseph Fourez) served his vision selflessly over 3 1/2 hours.

Py reserved the most prestigious spot in the Avignon lineup for a favorite of his: French director Thomas Jolly, 36, who opened the festival in the cavernous Cour d’Honneur in the Palais des Papes. Jolly’s loud, special-effects-heavy productions can be hit-or-miss, but he rose to the occasion here with “Thyeste,” a rare Latin-language tragedy based on Greek mythology, by Seneca the Younger.

This tale of ruthless revenge suits Jolly, who cast himself as Atreus, the king who murders his brother Thyestes’ children and then serves them up to him during a feast. An actor with more gravitas might have made even more of the role, but the production was shrewdly tailored to its venue. The scenography, credited to Jolly and to Christèle Lefèbvre, embraced the Cour’s dimensions, with laser lights and oversize sculptures of a head and a hand that appear to have detached from a colossus. The Palais des Papes in the background evoked the epic nature of the story of the House of Atreus, and it was supplemented by a full chorus of children, some rap and a levitating banquet table.

If only more women had been given a seat in its vicinity.

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