The big opening show of the Avignon Festival is not what you think. On Saturday June 29, in the afternoon, director Séverine Chavrier inaugurated this 78e edition, at La Fabrica, with a prodigious spectacle of intelligence and formal invention. Absalon, Absalon!an adaptation of Faulkner’s monster novel, is offered as an immersive and unprecedented five-hour theatrical experience, a hallucinatory nightmare which, in the nauseating times we live in, will probe in depth the obsession with racial purity on which capitalist and patriarchal expansion has relied.
Everything here is part of a freedom, a virtuosity and an intimate, deep understanding, in the adaptation of this book, a priori unadaptable, which carries in its torrential flow the rise and fall of a man, Thomas Sutpen, before, during and after the Civil War which opposed the South and the North of the United States, from 1861 to 1865, on the question of the abolition of slavery. Sutpen, a man who came from nowhere, becomes in a few years the biggest cotton planter in the county, feared – but not respected – by the small society of the town, steeped in its traditions.
His success will be immediately hampered by the injunction that weighs on him to found a purebred lineage, while he knows he is tainted by a stain, in this southern world where the slightest drop of black blood is enough for you. to be classified as Black, and therefore to exclude you. What Faulkner works on, he who was a man from this not really progressive South, is the curse that strikes this world where miscegenation is at the same time inevitable and forbidden – inevitable, too, because forbidden and therefore hidden, buried. A curse which here takes the form of incest and fratricide, Faulkner being part of a lineage which goes from Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, via the biblical substrate.
Interdisciplinary theater
Faulkner kneads all this in a very particular way, as non-linear as possible, into a form of an indomitable river of flow of consciousness which goes back the course of a troubled and unspoken history, and triggering a “crash of times” between the 1860s and the 1930s, where he wrote the book. “Faulkner’s work has always seemed to me to be like this: a deferred revelation, which generates his technique, not of elucidation (psychological, nor social, nor…) but, ultimately, of the amassing of a mystery and winding of a vertigo”, wrote Edouard Glissant in the magnificent book he dedicated to the American writer (Faulkner, MississippiGallimard, Folio essays) and who guided Séverine Chavrier in her reading ofAbsalon!.
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