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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part IV)Reviews (6)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 27th August, 2006When I first scrutinised the programme for the 2006 Avignon Festival and started drawing rings around the productions I intended to see, my initial response was disappointment. I had hoped to see the type of controversial, interdisciplinary theatre work that had turned 2005 into an almighty fracas. The festival programmers, it seemed, were playing it safe. This year's festival seemed to be dominated by playwrights again: three plays by Bond along with Gorki, Marguerite Duras, Joël Pommerat, Olivier Py, Hirata. There were other text-bound productions and adaptations from novels. It seemed like a grand palliative to the souls of the traditionalists injured by the 2005 programming of enfant terrible Jan Fabre. Central to the reconciliation was Gorki's Barbarians - a traditional piece of playwriting - in the Cour d'Honneur itself. Was my initial assumption correct? I steered clear of most of the text-bound stuff and eventually I must say that I had a very enjoyable and thought-provoking festival. This has definitely been Josef Nadj's festival: the mark of his own preoccupations and experiences is stamped on most of the work I saw in one way or another and following the links has been intriguing. My major disappointments centred around the use of the Cour d'Honneur itself rather than with the productions performed in its vast and difficult space. Vilar himself said that the space was too difficult to work in, but obviously had second thoughts after the army offered to build him a stage. Nonetheless, the stage and audience accommodation was a modest affair in comparison with today's event and with the present seating configuration, the venue is more suitable to grand spectacular productions such as Mnouchkine's Shakespeare cycle, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and the work of those directors working in the '80s and '90s with a penchant for visual mise-en-scènes on a grand scale. Barbarians by Maxim Gorki, directed by Eric Lascade My disappointment had nothing to do with the production itself. Lascade surmounted the challenges imposed by the almost unworkable width of the stage in the Cour d'Honneur and the actors performed beautifully. Lascade has worked with the same ensemble for many years at the Centre Dramatique National de Normandie which most likely accounts for the organic quality of the performance, a sense of the authentic in human interactions that never fell into the trap of aiming for naturalism. Lascade is renowned in France as an interpreter of Chekhov and he teases out the nuances in individual reactions without loosing the sense that the whole is more than merely the sum of the parts. In many respects, the themes of Barbarians are apposite. This is a community under threat from outsiders; a community on the brink of change. It raises questions that should be ours as well. Lascade and his ensemble balanced the humour with the darker aspects of the play. If I had seen this in a smaller venue I would have enjoyed it thoroughly, but I had a feeling that it was drowned by the sheer weight of the space. The Cour d'Honneur of the Papal Palace is vast. The palace itself is more of a fortress than a residence, built as it was at a time when this part of the Mediterranean had been embroiled for centuries in religious and territorial wars, with pillaging hoards led by scumbag robber barons marauding around the periphery of the Mediterranean under one pretext or another. It is a building that bellows loudly in its own voice of power, oppression and intrigue. Perhaps, in many ways that is apt given the subject of Barbarians but the scale is all wrong. One can't help but gaze up at the massive and solid towers that thrust into the sky. Even the courtyard wall used as a backdrop to the stage soars relentlessy. When Vilar first staged a festival here there were just a couple of hundred seats directly in front of the stage. Now, metal bleachers reach up almost to the top of the courtyard with seating for 2,400 punters. To work in this space the production needs to make itself felt and heard and Barbarians with its gentler Chekhovian overtones was simply dwarfed. >> Next
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