The director of the Avignon Festival, the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, in Boulbon near Avignon, on June 27, 2024, during a rehearsal of his play “Hecuba, not Hecuba”
PHOTO AFP / CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU
It is a “scandal of abuse of autistic children in a Swiss institution” which is at the origin of this project. “I was rehearsing a play in Geneva when this scandal arose, and I understood that one of the mothers of the abused children was an actress I was working with,” the Portuguese director told AFP.
This is his fifth play presented at the festival, the first as director of this prestigious event which began on Saturday.
“I was very impressed by the way in which, in our societies, where (…) there is still access to essential goods and rights for the majority of the population, we can still, collectively, be so neglectful towards the most vulnerable And on the other hand, by the strength of this actress,” he confides.
When the Comédie-Française invited him to do a play, he set out to find a female character who had to go through a double suffering, “in her life” and “in a play”. Tiago Rodrigues then thought of the classical Greek author Euripides and his character Hecuba.
Queen of Troy, who became a slave after the fall of the city, discovered that her youngest son, whom she believed to be safe with the king of the Thracians, had been murdered by the latter and then demanded justice and revenge.
Nadia (Elsa Lepoivre) plays this woman, both a theater actress rehearsing “Hecuba” and a mother seeking justice for the murder of her child, on trial in court.
In the setting of the Carrière de Boulbon, a major venue of the festival which reopened last year after seven years of closure, the six other actors of the Frenchman – Denis Podalydès, Loïc Corbery, Éric Génovèse, Ellissa Alloula, Séphora Pondi and Gaël Kamilindi – play either characters from the Greek tragedian or characters who emerge in the judicial investigation.
The play “plays on this labyrinth between fiction and reality and tries to share this confusion, rich and poetic, with the audience,” Tiago Rodrigues emphasizes. Sometimes even blurring the lines and offering the spectators, at certain moments, not knowing which of the two stories a particular character belongs to.
Denis Podalydès is thus both Agamemnon and a prosecutor. “From the moment there are two texts in one, two roles in one, for any actor, it’s pleasant,” he told AFP during a rehearsal.
He invites us to “let ourselves be carried away” by “the rhythm of the dialogue, the words” and “by the logic of a language”, sometimes that of the almost “cinematographic” story of the Portuguese playwright, sometimes that of Greek tragedy.
Tiago Rodrigues expresses the hope that “the judicial investigation will illuminate the power of Euripides’ brilliant writing and show how close it is to us today.”
The former director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon likes to draw inspiration from or rewrite classic authors (“Antony and Cleopatra” in 2015, based on Shakespeare) but also to pay homage to the theatre in all its aspects (the theatre prompter, in “Sopro” in 2017).
“+Hecuba, not Hecuba+ is also a play about the force of the law in all circumstances. Hecuba, defeated, tells us that, even in times of war, there are actions that can be considered crimes,” he says.
Denis Podalydès considers himself lucky to have been able to participate in this play. “We, the troupe of the Comédie-Française, who work a lot among ourselves, it is also a way of opening the windows wide.”
