Eric Ruf, 55, administrator of the Comédie-Française, carries a family heritage linked to the far right. The Portuguese playwright and director Tiago Rodrigues, 47, director of the Avignon Festival, received the “Carnation Revolution” award. While the second will go up in July Hecuba, not Hecubaaccording to Euripides, with the Frenchman’s troupe, they both link the current democratic crisis to that which affects live performance, as a symptom of a collapse of public service values.
What is your feeling about the results of the European elections on June 9 and the possible coming to power of the National Rally (RN) in July?
Eric Ruf: Me, I am not the child of a revolution, but that of a somewhat suspect neutrality, whether Swiss or Norwegian. I am the son of a man who voted for the National Front, and I loved my father, despite everything, because he was my father. So I’ve had a thought and a point of view on this for a long time: because of this family history, I can’t just estimate that a certain percentage of the population is brainless. I see how important paradoxes can be. My father, who was a doctor, made us study humanities, Greek and Latin, and read National Weekly. From adolescence, I had a feeling of incomprehension that he could go from one to the other without it blowing up in his face. I have the impression of a cycle, of an eternal return that never ceases to worry me. And I have the feeling that it has been a long time since we have been able to grasp the complexity of the world.
Tiago Rodrigues: I think that one of the fundamental questions is that of values, and it is very linked to the cultural question. In France, and I do not risk the slightest chauvinism in saying this as a Portuguese who has just arrived, there are still eighty years of democratization of access to culture, of relation to national education , to youth, to the social field which are exemplary, and all this in a context of cultural diversity, of openness to the world. What produced this adventure which is not at all over, even if it is in danger, were values: an idea, a belief, certainly unquantifiable, that culture created social cohesion, favored the promotion of difference , of debate, enriched democracy with a complex discourse. However, political parties of all sides have betrayed these values, and their defense. There is a distancing in public political discourse from the value of culture, from its importance. We have entered an era of absolutely pragmatic, even cynical, electoral strategic debate, which abandons values and the debate of ideas.
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