Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau 9781474273916, 9781474273947, 9781474273930

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Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau

SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE Series Editors Bridget Escolme, Peter Holland and Farah Karim-Cooper Published titles The American Shakespeare Center, Paul Menzer Mark Rylance at the Globe, Stephen Purcell Nicholas Hytner, Abigail Rokison-Woodall Forthcoming titles Cheek by Jowl, Peter Kirwan The King’s Men, Lucy Munro Peter Hall, Stuart Hampton-Reeves The Other Place: The RSC and Studio Theatre, Abigail Rokison-Woodall and Lisa Hammond-Marty Peter Sellars, Ayanna Thompson Shakespeare in Berlin, 1918–2018, Holger Schott Syme Shakespeare and the National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall, Robert Shaughnessy Trevor Nunn, Russell Jackson

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau Dominique Goy-Blanquet

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Dominique Goy-Blanquet, 2018 Dominique Goy-Blanquet has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Desarthe’s performance / Hamlet © Josep Ros Ribas. Courtesy of Valérie Six/Odéon Theatre, Paris All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goy-Blanquet, Dominique, author. Title: Shakespeare in the theatre : Patrice Châereau / Dominique Goy-Blanquet. Other titles: Patrice Châereau Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Series: Shakespeare in the theatre | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017045569 (print) | LCCN 2018037262 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474273923 (epub) | ISBN 9781474273930 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474273916(hcalk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Dramatic production. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Stage history--1950- | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Stage history--France. | Châereau, Patrice--Appreciation. Classification: LCC PR3107 (ebook) | LCC PR3107 .G69 2018 (print) | DDC 792.02/33092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045569 ISBN :

HB : PB : ePDF : eBook:

978-1-474-27391-6 978-1-350-13669-4 978-1-474-27393-0 978-1-474-27392-3

Series: Shakespeare in the Theatre Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Series Preface viii Introduction ix

1 The Formative Years

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2 First Elizabethan Encounters 3 Through Space and Time 4 Hamlet Modern

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5 Contemporary Writing at Les Amandiers 6 Teaching and Educating 7 Movable Pictures

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8 Farewell to Shakespeare 9 Chéreau’s Heirs

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Appendix 1: Chronology of Main Productions 197 Appendix 2: List of People Cited 201 Notes 211 Select Bibliography 249 Index 251

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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2

3 4

Patrice Chéreau with Vincent Pérez during the shooting of Hôtel de France, 1986. Photo © Pénélope Chauvelot. Chéreau’s answer to the journalists who asked him what he would draw on the tablecloths to while away the time now that he was leaving Sartrouville. Action culturelle du Sud-Est, March-April-May 1969, no. 3. Archives IMEC . Two phases of Chéreau’s text for the programme of Richard II, 1970. Fonds Chéreau, archives IMEC .

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Patrice Chéreau rehearsing Botho Strauss’s Le Temps et la Chambre at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, 1991. Photo © Ros Ribas/collection Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. 195

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FIGURE 1 Patrice Chéreau with Vincent Pérez during the shooting of Hôtel de France, 1986. Photo © Pénélope Chauvelot.

With grateful thanks to Lucien Attoun, Corinne Bacharach, Georges Banu, Michel Bataillon, Yves Beaunesne, Jacques Bonnaffé, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Calvario, Céline Carrère, Juliette Caron, Pénélope Chauvelot, Pablo Cisneros, Philippe Coutant, Jean-Michel Déprats, Gérard Desarthe, Colette Godard, Armelle Héliot, Brigitte Hernandez, Vincent Huguet, Joël Huthwohl, David Lan, Monique Le Roux, Alain Libolt, Daniel Loayza, Marianne Merleau-Ponty, Sylvie de Nussac, Richard Peduzzi, Olivier Rabourdin, François Regnault, Eric Ruf, Valérie Six, Catherine Tasca, Thierry Thieû Niang, Christine VézinetCrombecque, and Jean-Pierre Vincent who shared with me their thoughts, documents and memories of Patrice Chéreau.

SERIES PREFACE

Each volume in the Shakespeare in the Theatre series focuses on a director or theatre company who has made a significant contribution to Shakespeare production, identifying the artistic and political/social contexts of their work. The series introduces readers to the work of significant theatre directors and companies whose Shakespeare productions have been transformative in our understanding of his plays in performance. Each volume examines a single figure or company, considering their key productions, rehearsal approaches and their work with other artists (actors, designers, composers). A particular feature of each book is its exploration of the contexts within which these theatre artists have made their Shakespeare productions work. Thus, the series considers not only the ways in which directors and companies produce Shakespeare, but also reflects upon their other theatre activity and the broader artistic, cultural and socio-political milieu within which their Shakespeare performances and productions have been created. The key to the series’ originality, then, is its consideration of Shakespeare production in a range of artistic and broader contexts; in this sense, it de-centres Shakespeare from within Shakespeare studies, pointing to the range of people, artistic practices and cultural phenomena that combine to make meaning in the theatre. Series Editors: Bridget Escolme, Peter Holland, Farah Karim-Cooper

INTRODUCTION

At age 24, Patrice Chéreau became nationally famous with a production of Richard II that earned him insults in Le Monde, France’s most respected daily newspaper, from the no less respected poet Pierre Leyris, his translator. Six years later, his fame grew worldwide when his centenary Ring made Winifred Wagner, keeper of the Bayreuth flame, want to shoot him, but ended with an hour-and-a-half-long standing ovation. In 2011 directors from around the globe flew to London for his first English production, I Am the Wind, at the Young Vic. The curtain fell with a crash in 2013 while he was rehearsing Comme il vous plaira (As You Like It), a production designed to celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. Every event of Chéreau’s eventful career in between, whether opera, film or theatre production, shocked, surprised, enchanted and moved audiences as no director ever had before. Shakespeare was first summoned on Chéreau’s stage in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, to answer the students’ political queries in Dimitriádis’s Prix de la révolte au marché noir (‘The price of rebellion in the black market’), and remained with him to the end. After their long exchanges over the texts of Hamlet and As You Like It, his favourite translator, the poet Yves Bonnefoy, thought that a man like Chéreau, ‘both fascinated by violence and capable of the deepest tenderness, impetuous yet affectionate and faithful, was attracted to Shakespeare in whom he recognized a similar polarity of the Dasein, the being-in-theworld, with enough room in the spirit to allow every aspect of its contradictions, tensions, to contribute to a less inhibited and thus more generous existence’.1 Even before the theatre, painting dominated Patrice Chéreau’s youthful landscape. When invited to the Louvre in 2010 to create

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his own ideal exhibition, he remembered regular visits there as a child with his father, the painter Jean-Baptiste Chéreau. His mother Marguerite Pélicier was a textile designer. His maternal great-grandmother Lise Tréhot had modelled for Renoir, and left her descendants with a nest egg, three unsigned canvasses kept on top of the family wardrobe, until his parents sold them to buy a dilapidated eighteenth-century house in Anjou they would seldom visit.2 They lived in a presbytery facing the church. The child was fascinated by the funeral pageants he could watch from home – as he was by the Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Seville when the family took a holiday trip to Spain. Textiles and textures, colour and light, the shadow of death. It is no easy task to distinguish fact from fiction in this strange eventful history. Chéreau’s own memory may not be entirely reliable, and rumour stalked him to the end. The obituaries added error to invention. One confused Renoir with Rodin as the artist who immortalized Lise. Another asserted Patrice had learnt German on the job in three months to ‘bawl out’ the stage-hands of The Ring in their own language, blithely ignoring the fact that he had been an early visitor to the Berliner Ensemble, while translating Kleist and Lenz himself for his student productions.3 The label ‘aesthete’, soon misguidedly attached to him, would stick. His father was acquainted with Roger Planchon, one of France’s leading directors, then manager of the Théâtre de la Cité in Lyon-Villeurbanne where he would exhibit Jean-Baptiste’s works,4 and teenage Patrice was allowed to attend rehearsals. The play, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, gave him his first tangible access to the Elizabethan world, where he would return throughout his career. Planchon found the boy very shy, but a decade or so later he went to see Chéreau’s productions in Sartrouville, and eventually invited him to co-manage the Villeurbanne Théâtre National Populaire (when Jean Vilar’s illustrious TNP was transferred to the suburbs of Lyon) and direct Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris.5 Why young Patrice came to the theatre, he does not quite know: ‘I’m sure that images were there to begin with; words

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came later.’6 But not images built in the loneliness of an artist’s studio like his father’s. Images that told a story, the sum of his permanent questioning of art: would the Louvre exhibits speak of depression, lethargy, mortality, or meditate on painting, portrayal, bodies? ‘And what bodies? Desire, the lack of desire, the death of desire, the diseased body, the mutilations?’ The exhibition, opened on All Souls Day, which happens to be his birthday, saw the creation of Jon Fosse’s Rêve d’automne in the salon Denon of the museum, while Waltraud Meier sang the Wesendonck Lieder surrounded by Goya’s paintings: ‘We set ourselves an absolute duty of story-telling, a unique narration that would encompass everything, all the words that will be pronounced, the various styles of music that will be heard, the movements of bodies through space.’7 All combined as in a grand opera to make ‘a long, plaintive, melancholy song, cruel at times, with its moments of grace and despair, a quest for beauty, constantly threatened by time, work, desire, the spectator’s gaze’.8 Chéreau’s harshest critics regularly paid tribute to his unique talent for conveying the story through an image, like the separation of the royal couple in his youthful Richard II, drawn apart by the drawbridge’s motion. This, his first major Shakespeare production, was designed in collaboration with the painter-architect Richard Peduzzi. Until their decisive meeting, young Patrice used to build his own sets. His personal experience of painting helped him to organize space, submit the real to his will, make it opaque or transparent, complex or simple but always readable to an audience: My father’s fight with those of his paintings he had pronounced to be failures, the corpses and the pieces of plywood that strewed the floor of his studio bore testimony to the violence of the fighting: yes, I do recognize myself there, as in his mix of deep laziness (the kind that compels you to work all the time) and frenzied energy which is the stuff of my own fight, a fight that has its arena in me but somehow plays itself out without me, powerless everyday,

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this trade that does not have a respectable name but that I endure and practise nonetheless with tenderness and violence.9 From his earliest days, theatre and cinema constituted his own ‘war machine against melancholy’.10 The father’s struggles with painting, and with illness, appear in the suffering bodies of his drawings, Dessins de la Salpêtrière,11 as they would in the son’s staged tableaux. The child Patrice was haunted by the fear of abandonment, by the death of his grandparents. His grandmother’s dead body, the first corpse he saw, is what he will recall in the paintings chosen for the Louvre exhibition, with words borrowed from the last Plantagenet’s nightmare at Bosworth: ‘ “Despair and die”, Richard’s victims told me at age 15, but I answered, no, I will work in the theatre.’12

1 The Formative Years

No matter how clumsy and ugly the teenager felt, he seems to have arrived fully armed at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the first step to his conquest of the stage. He joined the school’s Groupe de théâtre, where he met Jacques Schmidt who would be his costume designer, Jean-Pierre Vincent, future administrator general of the Comédie-française, Jérôme Deschamps, future manager of the Opéra-comique, Michel Bataillon, now the living archive of contemporary theatre. Jérôme Clément, who would found and preside over the TV channel ARTE , he already knew from the Lycée Montaigne when they were boys. Having practised fencing, Chéreau was able to fix the duels in the school’s repertoire.1 There were many, he remembers, in Romeo and Juliet, in which he played the part of an old man, his other specialty. In no time he and Vincent took the leadership of the group, then spent the three years before baccalauréat doing all the jobs themselves.

Educational sources Young Chéreau read as he ate, voraciously, as he always would. Very little fiction, apart from Les Liaisons dangereuses, which followed him through the years. And ‘useful’ theoretical works – mostly, exegeses: ‘everything about Shakespeare, for instance’.2 He and Vincent aimed to create a new style of

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acting, away from the current declamatory mode, with a patchwork of American burlesque, German expressionism, and what they understood of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. While Vincent learnt Italian to read Goldoni, and have access to Meyerhold’s exercises via Italian translations, Chéreau translated ‘useful’ essays on Brecht or Piscator. Throughout his career, each new project set him to read everything he could find related to its matter – history, context, criticism, earlier productions – or unrelated. Wagner’s Ring takes him miles away from the text itself, on ‘a circumnavigation’ that can speak to his and his actors’ imagination, followed by a ‘journey underground to its very centre’,3 then a selfcommand to ‘forget everything and really start telling the story’.4 In preparation for directing extracts with the students of École des Amandiers, he re-read all Shakespeare’s comedies. While working on Hamlet, he commissioned a translation of John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ so the whole cast could read it. In the first stages of preparing As You Like It, Starobinski’s essay on L’Encre de la mélancolie (‘The ink of melancholy’) sat by his side. Before Shakespeare, his first passion was German literature, which he studied for two years at the Sorbonne, along with Bernard Dort’s lectures on the theatre, and those of Edouard Pfrimmer, a translator of Brecht. Yet he never felt tempted to put on Brecht’s plays, and claims he never understood the alienation effect, which he definitely did not practise. An early witness like the radio producer Lucien Attoun remembers he was wholly oriented towards German dramaturgs at the time, entranced by Klaus-Michael Grüber, and began to read the nineteenth-century farces of Labiche when he heard that Peter Stein was interested in the playwright. The interest may have travelled the opposite way: Labiche was on the Louis-le-Grand syllabus in the mid-1950s, and Stein directed La Cagnotte (The Piggy Box) two years after Vincent’s German performance of the play in Bochum in 1971.5 There was a lasting rivalry between the Brechtian disciples, and similar tastes. If Stein came first with Edward Bond, directing Saved in 1967, and

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with Ibsen, it was Chéreau who led with Shakespeare, Jean Genet, and Koltès. The 21-year-old Chéreau detailed his likes and dislikes in one of his earliest interviews (perhaps the first) on his production of Labiche’s L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine. A great admirer of Jean Vilar when a teenager, he has moved on, and is moving away from Brecht, though he still finds much to learn from him. His marked preference now goes to Planchon, followed perhaps by Adamov, Lavelli . . . Most of the current celebrities leave him cold. He quite likes Genet despite some weaknesses, but dismisses Roger Blin’s recent creation of Les Paravents as a complete failure; feels awed but untouched by Beckett and would never want to put on one of his plays. Barrault’s work he finds sloppy, Ionesco’s philosophy superficial and vulgar. ‘You judge these famous people from the height of your future achievements’, his shrewd interviewer tells him.6 Yes, he has seen their productions, read their plays, including all of Labiche. When questioned about the changes made to the text of Lourcine, he explains he found the ending unbearably weak, a complete reversal, and a denial, of the mechanism Labiche has so skilfully set out, which shows a couple of petit-bourgeois turning into would-be murderers. In the play, they wake up from a bad dream to find it was all an illusion and they have committed no crime: after depicting them with vicious precision, Labiche tells us they are not dangerous, nor so nasty as they seemed. So Chéreau simply cut the end, an operation he will repeat time and again for varied reasons, and added pieces from other plays by Labiche to create a broader picture of their milieu. Chéreau’s literary preferences, rehearsed near the end of his life in a reading at the Odéon, ran from classic to contemporary, from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Georg Büchner’s Lenz, Hofmannsthal’s encounter with the paintings of Van Gogh, Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer, to Hervé Guibert’s portrait of Orson Welles, and the monologue of Anna in one of Koltès’s earliest plays, Sallinger.7 Not only direct sources of inspiration, or powerful influences, they sketched a brief account of himself.

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Discussing this selection of texts, Chéreau admitted he was a poor reader of drama, even before his encounter with Koltès, who made other living dramatists suffer by comparison. The shock of his first encounter with the magnificent language of Büchner was Jean Vilar’s direction of Danton’s Death, followed by Büchner’s translations of Victor Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor. Orson Welles, his youthful idol, embodied all he had ever wanted to do: ‘Shakespeare, the theatre company, the cinema all converged in my mind.’ Apart from Fritz Lang, whose M (1931) he saw fourteen times, his other favourite filmmakers were the rare ones who also directed plays, Bergman, Kazan, Visconti – matching his own ambition. Yet even with these strong precedents, it had taken him years before he felt legitimate in practising both arts. More than reading dramatists, an early experience of live theatre formed an important part of Chéreau’s training. From the age of 13 he went to see plays once a week, buying tickets himself out of his meagre pocket money for Théâtre des Nations, Comédie-Française, everything on show, even ‘boulevard’ low-brow comedies. He discovered Vilar’s Théâtre national populaire (TNP ) in the ‘theatrical desert of 1958– 60’.8 His first intoxicating experience was the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to Paris in 1960, after which he made regular trips to Berlin. The encounter so fired him that he drew fictive sets copying theirs, for fictive productions, until he built his first one at Louis-le-Grand. His interest in the Enlightenment and in the Sturm und Drang was sparked off later, while a student, but really grew around his production of Lenz’s Soldiers, when he read Starobinski’s L’Invention de la liberté.9 The French Revolution with its discovery of a world that might live without God and religion had an important bearing on his development. Marivaux was a way to learn drama, ‘a resolutely modern drama in its analysis of the heart and the contradictions of the heart’.10 Actually Chéreau did much to make it modern, by breaking its crust of golden elegance to extract a harsh social critique from its picture of a violent society. Most of his early productions, up to Bond’s Lear, would explore the

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mechanisms of successful or more often aborted revolutions, and what caused them to fail, ‘the bloody passage from one era to another’. A no less significant part of Chéreau’s education was at the Cinémathèque rue d’Ulm. There he first saw Eisenstein, the Expressionists, and Visconti, Bergman and Kazan, but did not feel attracted to the Nouvelle Vague that was so popular among his age-group – a lack of interest he would later deplore. There he met one of his first masters, Orson Welles. For the 16-year-old, Welles was both a model and an inspiration: ‘here is one who comes from the theatre, I would ponder, and who makes films’.11 Citizen Kane was done with theatre actors. A 21-year-old Welles had directed Horse Eats Hat, adapted from Labiche’s Italian Straw Hat, at the Mercury in 1936, his second production for the Works Progress Administration (WPA ) after the Voodoo Macbeth. No doubt 21-year-old Chéreau thought of Welles when he made an equally ruthless adaptation of Labiche’s Lourcine thirty years later. And perhaps he felt a touch of envy for the WPA , the largest New Deal agency, which recruited millions of unemployed people in public works projects: one of its branches, the Federal Art Project, created community art centres around the country, commissioning thousands of artists to engage with art production, art instruction and art research. Welles introduced him to Shakespeare:12 Welles’s film Mr Arkadin ends with a Shakespearean exit line, ‘Fifty million marks for a seat on that plane.’13 Alongside those learned references, memories of silent movies, of Chaplin and Buster Keaton, would be tapped to help him find a common ground with the popular audiences of Sartrouville when he took over the management of the local theatre at age 22.

Political nomadism The story of those formative years was repeatedly told in the obituaries of 2013. Let me briefly recall the Parisian scene of

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the early 1960s, when Lycée Louis-le-Grand and its female equivalent, Lycée Fénelon, sizzled with arguments over colonial wars and theatrical politics – Vilar’s modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace or his Arturo Ui at the Théâtre de Chaillot, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Resnais/Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour and Marienbad, Jean-Luc Godard . . . During France’s last colonial war, Chéreau found himself taking sides instinctively, he recalls, at a demonstration that turned into a fight between partisans of ‘l’Algérie française’, whom he found too arrogant, and supporters of ‘l’Algérie libre’. Several street marches later, after being caught by the police carrying his thick Latin dictionary (an odd weapon, but a good prop to a story), his political commitment was radicalized when, sitting behind a café window, he witnessed the violent beatings that caused the deaths of nine demonstrators at the Charonne underground station in 1962. With the support of suburban communist municipalities, several theatres had opened on the periphery of Paris, in the wake of Vilar’s democratizing programme. The new Vincent/ Chéreau company took part in various festivals, and were invited by Bernard Sobel, another committed Brechtian, to perform on the large stage of Gennevilliers.14 They interpreted Marivaux and Labiche, there and in smaller Parisian venues, with a liberty, cruelty and energy that soon attracted serious critical attention.15 When offered the use of the Théâtre de Sartrouville in 1966, Chéreau established his company there. His commitment to popular theatre sent him and his actors to perform in factories, meet works councils, take part in trade union seminars, discuss with teachers and generally strive to reach a new audience. They offered not only plays but also debates, lectures, exhibitions, concerts and films. Chéreau’s editorial in the first issue of the theatre magazine, théâtre 78, stated he would give pride of place to creation: ‘Here is a new utopia: create spectacles in Sartrouville’, not just offer the people culture through consumption of the world’s treasures, but involve them at the source of the process, a research into the repertory and the work of theatre directing.16 This research

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involved his own special brand of politics: the third issue began with the statement that ‘Our trade, we believe, is to tell stories’, a creed he would always adhere to, and ended with a quotation from Nizan: ‘What Marx says in the Manifesto, if this book is properly read: Man is love, and he is prevented from loving.’17 The phrase ‘if this book is properly read’ is important: to Chéreau, proper reading meant breaking through the surface of a text and extracting the hidden tensions he detected in its depths. To Lucien Attoun, who spotted another source, Chéreau confessed he had seen Visconti’s film Senso sixteen times, breaking his earlier record with Lang’s M. The tragic tensions of human love would be persistently explored in his most political tales. Adulation and hatred dogged him from the start, some of the critics accusing him of being a threat to ‘good theatre’.18 His production of Molière’s Dom Juan in 1969 was denounced as sacrilege, its depraved, ruined aristocratic hero as the degradation of a mythical figure. It was performed on a set co-designed with Peduzzi as ‘a machine to kill libertines’: Molière having sided with those in power, the statue of the Commander embodied the sum of repressive forces.19 Among other transgressions, Chéreau cut the famous scene with M. Dimanche. Why? Because he judged it badly written! The reviews of his productions reproduced in his Sartrouville magazine were quite laudatory, except the devastating comment he ironically quotes at the end of the list: ‘At age 23, Mr Chéreau has some qualities of the great stage directors: breadth, authority, neat ensemble work, and all their faults, from a sense of swank to total scorn of text and author.’20 This was in April 1968. According to Bernard Dort, also writing in April 1968 in Les Temps modernes, ‘the theatre is haunted by one question: its ability to represent contemporary reality, to summon on stage the world we live in’. The aim was to reach a larger public than its traditional bourgeois audience. The new subsidized ‘popular theatres’ would have to choose: either remain museums of dramatic culture, or directly confront reality and play a part in the establishment of a new society.21

FIGURE 2 Chéreau’s answer to the journalists who asked him what he would draw on the tablecloths to while away the time now that he was leaving Sartrouville. Action culturelle du Sud-Est, March-AprilMay 1969, no. 3. Archives IMEC.

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For young Chéreau, the choice was ready-made. He enjoyed the heady experience of 1968 but its brutal conclusion, engineered by the CGT trade union, sealed his distance from the Communist Party. At Planchon’s invitation, he had attended the meeting of the directors of Maisons de la Culture, whose Déclaration de Villeurbanne on 25 May stated everone’s right of access to culture, and expressed their common will to meet the ‘non public’, i.e. the people who never went to the theatre.22 The Sartrouville statistics after one year of existence reported over 23,000 spectators for 48 productions, and 18,000 educational brochures distributed. But state funding did not come up to expectations, and Chéreau’s experiment was expensive. The Prix des Jeunes Compagnies won by his production of Lenz’s Soldiers brought him 60,000 francs, but the show had cost double that sum. The Sartrouville experience ended in bankruptcy: the debts totalled 600,000 francs, a third of which was covered by the State and the Town Hall, leaving the remnant to Chéreau’s charge. A special issue of the theatre magazine in March 1969 announced his resignation. The bankruptcy also registered the failure of ideologies: ‘How could one possibly create a popular culture in a nonpopular State?’23 He no longer believed in a management guided by the spirit of Vilar’s ‘théâtre populaire’, which ‘failed to answer all the expectations it had raised’: ‘the notion of a humanist culture for the people paid for by the bourgeoisie was an all-round illusion, not just a lesser evil, a betrayal, perhaps’. His manifesto, entitled ‘An exemplary death’, pointed out the deep misunderstandings and confusions that beset the ideology of ‘popular theatre’ in contemporary France.24 No matter how progressive they hope to be, intellectuals are on the side of the masters; artists cannot change the world, only discuss it, nor hope to augment their popular audience indefinitely, nor do the job of schools. It was impossible to pursue a creative aesthetic research and at the same time chase new spectators. The young bankrupt was saved from the dole by Paolo Grassi’s invitation to Milan. His next step, with the Piccolo

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Teatro, during the Fascistic threats of the 1970s, moved him on to less open statements, reflecting on the modes of transmission and translation of politics to the stage. Giorgio Strehler had visited Paris with his Opera da tre soldi in 1960, the same year as the Berliner, and as powerfully entranced him. It was Planchon who showed his young disciple photographs of Strehler’s Galileo: its setting designed by Luciano Damiani determined his ensuing work, Chéreau later realized.25 He showed those same photographs to Richard Peduzzi, and both endlessly looked at them, wondering what made them so beautiful: ‘The whole Italian art of architecture, the science of painting were all there, placed at the service of a renewed Brechtian thought.’26 Looking at Damiani’s sets, one cannot miss their echoes in Chéreau and Peduzzi’s, the elegance and sobriety of the design, the architectural symmetries, the delicate colours, the lighting that gave warmth to the austere scenography. Chéreau was even tempted at one stage, after a quarrel with Peduzzi, to work with Damiani, but the temptation was short-lived.27 Strehler was the master he had chosen for himself, Chéreau would remember in his funeral homage to the great Italian director, a man for whom ‘the theatre has a responsibility towards the world and society’, who had taught him ‘everything’, and first ‘how to tell a story through the poetry of the theatre, how to combine levity and seriousness’.28 Strehler’s perfectionism, Damiani’s scenography based on Da Vinci’s ‘study of forces’, their fight against ‘old habits’, their joint effort with Paolo Grassi towards a ‘theatre of labour’ could not but appeal to the young artist.29 Strehler’s lessons were spelt out in his now famous open letter to the actors after the first run of Brecht’s Galileo, on the challenge presented by epic theatre, its tendency to greyness and indulgent slow rhythm: ‘remember that narrative theatre is above all a way of thinking, a form of commitment. It teaches moral responsibility, choice’.30 Strehler’s motto, inherited from Jacques Copeau’s example, was ‘Theatre representing moral responsibility in a collective

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context.’31 He worked in Italy at what Vilar was trying to do in France, ‘an art theatre for everybody’. They had a common ideal, theatre as a public service, which Chéreau would attempt to create at Sartrouville, a common master, Copeau, and similar plays on their to-do lists, Richard II and Murder in the Cathedral, Dom Juan, Büchner’s Danton, Strindberg’s Storm, some Brecht.32 Two of those, Richard II and Dom Juan, Chéreau would also direct, and play the part of Camille Desmoulins in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton.33 The Piccolo Teatro in Milan had opened the same year as the Avignon festival, 1947. Strehler and Grassi’s manifesto expressed a will to make the place a meeting point for the community and to work in depth to widen the audience of the theatre.34 When Chéreau failed to achieve this aim in Sartrouville, it must have seemed natural to pursue it in Milan where Grassi was calling him, and to learn Italian. Chéreau’s time in Italy began with Pablo Neruda’s Splendore e morte di Joaquin Murieta and continued with Tankred Dorst (Toller: Scene di una rivoluzione tedesca), Marivaux (La Finta Serva, translated from La Fausse Suivante), Wedekind (Lulu), and his first opera, Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri which he took to the Spoleto Festival. His choices are not eclectic, he asserts at the time, though what exactly guides them at that stage, he finds it hard to explain.35 Eclectic perhaps, yet persistently concerned with the victims of oppressive regimes and decadent societies. His list of leading characters is eloquent: Toller, an antifascist intellectual; Murieta, the Mexican Robin Hood, depicted by Neruda who died suspiciously soon after the fall of President Allende; Lulu, brutally manipulated from age 12 and driven to crime; Marivaux’s Demoiselle, the Mistress disguised as Servant, who unmasks and punishes the cynical fortune hunter Lelio. Through Marivaux’s work, Chéreau felt he was reading and understanding the whole of the eighteenth century: behind the optimistic ideology of the Enlightenment, hovered Dangerous Liaisons and the Marquis de Sade, both of which would cruelly serve to expose human nature in his production of Marivaux’s La Dispute in 1973. He would

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eventually return to Lulu in Alban Berg’s opera with the conductor Boulez, after their Ring in Bayreuth. During those years of Italian exile, he also answered commands and invitations like a ‘mercenaire’, a soldier of fortune.36 Like the shabby actors of Murieta who entered already made up for the show, carrying battered suitcases. The suitcase that keeps returning in Chéreau’s shows was originally his own, a situation that ended when Planchon called him back to France. Together they co-directed the new Théâtre National Populaire, transferred to Villeurbanne in 1972. Yet only when given the management of Les Amandiers in Nanterre, a decade later, would Chéreau be able to create the place to live and work in that he had dreamt of in Sartrouville. The transfer of the TNP – Jean Vilar’s historical creation – from Palais de Chaillot to the suburbs of Lyon was no mean feat. After Vilar’s departure, and his successor Georges Wilson’s rather poor level of success, the then Minister of Culture Jacques Duhamel offered the direction to Planchon, who agreed under various conditions, the first being he would stay in Villeurbanne. Duhamel in his roadmap stressed the value of Vilar’s heritage but bowed to the fact that the TNP, lodged as it was in a rich residential area of Paris, was no longer either national or popular, and needed a fresh impulse.37 Duhamel agreed to the move, naming jointly at the head of the renewed institution Chéreau and Planchon as artistic directors, flanked by the administrator Robert Gilbert. The actual management was entrusted to Planchon and Gilbert. Chéreau, who had lost his licence after the Sartrouville bankruptcy, could have no ‘commercial ability’. He felt himself to be a guest there: it was not his own house, though he enjoyed the luxurious conditions and the freedom of creation he was offered after years of hard living. Some of Planchon and Chéreau’s early supporters felt betrayed, and accused them of having hijacked the TNP to serve their own ends with public funding. Renée Saurel for one – she had reviewed three of Chéreau’s productions in Les Temps modernes (Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine) – wrote that the former rebels had turned

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into accomplices of ‘Power’, the government: they had embodied renewal, now they represented compromise. The new forms they offered barely masked the fact they had given up all efforts to cater for the working class and fallen into an aestheticism devoid of any real political foundation.38 A decade later, when Mitterrand’s election brought the Left to power, Jean-Pierre Vincent was named at the head of the Comédie-Française, and Chéreau was offered the management of the Odéon, but chose to settle down in the suburban Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre.39 On the opposite edge of Paris the director Ariane Mnouchkine was entrenched in the old Cartoucherie de Vincennes. The year 1968 had erupted into the University of Nanterre, sending thousands of students into the streets with the slogan ‘Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands’ (we are all German Jews) when their German-born leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France. The experimental University of Vincennes, the most durable imprint left by 1968, was erected just around the corner from Mnouchkine’s fortress. Both artists chose to stay on the periphery, and build there a company, though each attached different meanings to the term. Mnouchkine’s is a permanent revolution – each new project to this day brings together a new group of hard-labouring actorworkers in a new configuration – whereas Chéreau surrounded himself with a team, a substitute family of friends who worked with him from one project to the next, like Jacques Schmidt who designed his costumes; André Diot, in charge of the lights; André Serré, the sound engineer; and Richard Peduzzi, his scenographer to the end. Their methods also differed radically: Mnouchkine’s first concern was to create compelling images; Chéreau’s, to penetrate the text. After Planchon, Vilar and Strehler, and the disenchantments of Sartrouville, Chéreau’s artistic evolution was strongly influenced by his meeting with the playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, which was crucial to his engagement in the Nanterre project. There he would be able to fulfil what he considered his first duty as a director, bring an unknown talented playwright to the attention of an unprepared audience. Political commitments

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had become far more complex than in the 1960s, when one was either for or against Algerian independence. It was easier to choose one’s side when the cleavages between right and left were simple and straightforward: ‘it is not so clear now that today’s fights, including the cultural fights, altermondialism and so on, are not free from a revolutionary nostalgia that has grown totally obsolete’.40 In his view, without ever confronting a political problem head on, Koltès ‘stood absolutely at the heart of the town, the city, the problems of society’. Magnificent fictions like Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs) ‘held the centre of our relations with Africa’. Along with Koltès, a renowned living author would complete the opening. In 1966, the creation of Genet’s Les Paravents (The Screens) at the Odéon had raised fierce right-wing opposition and fights in the streets so intense that the play was performed under police protection. Reviving it seventeen years later, Chéreau transported the play from its Algerian setting to a 1950s cinema in Barbès, an area of Paris with a large population of North Africans, to focus on the living conditions of immigrants in France. While remaining faithful to Strehler’s aesthetics, Chéreau would gradually move away from the ‘renewed Brechtian thought’, asserting that he ‘gave up any wish to dispense lessons ages ago’,41 but he would never give up his own political struggle; still consistently resist all forms of injustice, of hypocrisy, all attacks against artistic liberty; still tirelessly pursue truth in his attempt to represent the real. Still remain independent enough to stand, with Ariane Mnouchkine, against the whole community of artists and technicians who engineered the cancellation of the Avignon festival in 2003.42 To slam the door of the Opéra Bastille when Daniel Barenboim was ungraciously fired by the Left government on their return to power after the ‘Cohabitation’, and retaliate three years later with a joint Wozzeck at the Châtelet.43 To disapprove of Luc Bondy’s use of political leverage to take Olivier Py’s place at the head of the Odéon.44 To demonstrate outside the courtroom at Vaclav Havel’s trial, get arrested, spend the night in jail, and direct a once-only performance of Le Procès de

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Prague in Munich the following year with Pavel Kohout, Simone Signoret, Volker Schlöndorf, Tom Stoppard and Yves Montand.45 To sign with Michel Foucault a petition against the war in Poland. He kept up this political commitment to the end through a constant will to move the lines and rigid features of the world we live in.

Early productions Louis-le-Grand saw the teenager’s first production in 1964: Victor Hugo’s L’Intervention, available in print only since 1951, had never been staged. Chéreau and Vincent were following the lead of Hubert Gignoux, a pioneer of decentralization, who had recently directed another forgotten play by Hugo, Mille Francs de récompense (A Thousand Francs Reward). They sought virgin territories to air their own views of the world. The influential drama theoretician Bernard Dort, who saw L’Intervention, noted the complete break, Chéreau’s first of many, with the stiff studied elegance of the school’s productions, its satirical mode bordering on caricature, ferocious disrespect, acute sense of the grotesque, and boundless theatrical vitality. He also detected the strong presence of Brecht, Planchon and Strehler, the roughness and weighty props of the Berliner Ensemble, the refinement, stylization and white lights of the Piccolo Teatro.46 Actually Chéreau was then trying to imitate the very specific daylight effect of the Berliner.47 The more subtle chiaroscuro, lighting up areas of the stage around the actor while leaving his face in the shade, would come later, drawn both from Strehler and Strehler’s own masters, Italian painting. Chéreau’s next production at Louis-le-Grand, Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, drew on miniatures of Brueghel and Bosch. It was his first brush with an ‘ “Elizabethan” story, in siglo de oro mode’, of a peasants’ uprising against their feudal commander. At the end of the play, they appeal to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, los reyes catholicos, who pardon all the offenders. Needless to say, Chéreau’s conclusion

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was not so forgiving: ‘We had found our inspiration in Brecht from A to Z.’48 Under the label Louis-le-Grand, even after they had all left grammar school, they were invited to perform in the students’ festivals organized by Alain Crombecque, then vice-president of the UNEF, the national students’ association that would play a major role in the events of 1968.49 When the actors of L’Héritier de village rushed on stage like bandits, wearing sunglasses and white suits, they were hooted at and denounced as Planchon’s understudies, but Chéreau pointed out that Marivaux had never been performed before with sunglasses. And the staging of L’Intervention was also a world première, he proudly reminded his interviewer.50 Several annotated versions of L’Intervention are kept with Chéreau’s archives in the library of IMEC , where documents of contemporary artists and writers are stored.51 The play features a couple of lovers whose poverty brutally tests their love when the temptations of luxury offered at the price of betrayal threaten to tear them apart. Chéreau felt he must ‘jouer serré contre Hugo’ (play a tight game against the author), whose sentimental tale he turned into an indictment of the characters’ alienation. The story occurs at a critical point in French history, when the rise of industrialism has destroyed many traditional crafts and sent thousands on the dole. This contrast of intimate theme and clash of worlds will endure throughout Chéreau’s career. Hélène Vincent, who played the lead, Marcelline, notes that with him politics and aesthetics were allied from the start. She remembers the experience as both ‘fundamental and traumatic’, how he taught her to abandon the ‘voix de tête’ (head register) that was then the rule, and close down the end of her lines the better to bite into the text. Her testimony is a potent mixture of admiration and resentment at Chéreau’s increasing egocentrism, which soon spelt the end of the joint venture.52 At the steering wheel of the Sartrouville theatre, Chéreau alternated Labiche and Marivaux with Lenz’s Soldiers, and two ancient Chinese plays. At the same time he was looking for modern playwrights in phase with current affairs. Le Prix

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de la révolte au marché noir opened his last season there. Its author, the Greek Dimítris Dimitriádis, intended it originally as an exercise for his theatre class: on a given theme, each student had to choose relevant scenes from Shakespeare and invent a plot to join them together. A year later, Dimitriádis was asked to turn the exercise into a play. Chéreau’s staged version, a combination of three scripts, freely mixed elements of the French student uprising with the political situation in Greece:53 right after the event, he stoutly declares, ‘we started reflecting about May 68 with the help of a text that did not speak of it but that we forced, massacred in fact, and obliged to discuss it’.54 Thus he ‘extensively tinkered’ with the play, introducing scenes from Cruelty theatre among other items.55 He would similarly ‘tinker with’ Neruda’s Murieta ‘to tell something I wanted to say about artists and the revolution.’56 At the time, he recalls, he was constantly repeating the same concerns, the position of artists and intellectuals in a revolutionary context. According to Chéreau’s synopsis for the programme, Dimitriádis’s ‘intellectuals ask what is the use of culture. They are theatre performers and they summon Shakespeare’s help to tell the horrors of the modern world. Later, they improvise on the same theme. In both cases the experiment fails: none of this is quite real or convincing.’57 Chéreau’s personal notes brand them as ‘dishonest’: they have read Brecht and Artaud, and rely on Shakespeare to show how violence and sacrifice rule human relations, but soon they will scrap him, ‘a little too fast, and replace his texts by a small modern piece of their own device that will prove nothing but their inability to produce a politically correct analysis of the society they live in’.58 Especially pregnant in Shakespeare’s plays, and significant to Chéreau, was the theatrum mundi leitmotiv, the poet’s awareness of the theatricality of history. Was the theme of civil war a ‘red thread’ in his thought processes as it was throughout Shakespeare? No, that is something he would come to understand later, but at the time it was a mode of entry to what interested him, the potentiality of violence it represented, the

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flesh it could give to power relationships between individuals, groups, human societies.59 Shakespeare resurfaced fleetingly in the announcement by Grassi that Chéreau would direct an Antony and Cleopatra for which he had an Italian translation ready, but the plan never materialized, and Valentina Cortese, who was to play Cleopatra, performed his Lulu instead.60 A typescript of Salvatore Quasimodo’s unused, unpublished, unannotated text in Chéreau’s archives attests that he did consider the project, though not for very long.61 In Milan, after tense discussions with Grassi over a choice of plays, his first production for the Piccolo was Splendore e morte di Joaquin Murieta. Pablo Neruda’s mix of styles must have struck a sympathetic chord: the poet explains in a foreword he is not a playwright and expects a director to translate freely into images this ‘tragedy, written at times as farce. It is designed to be a melodrama, an opera, a pantomime.’62 Chéreau fully exploited this liberty: he did not change one line, but cut the play into several ‘pieces of text’ and moved them around so as to open up ‘this slightly empty, slightly honorific, slightly useless commemoration of a hero from the past’, while expressing ‘two or three things I wanted to say’.63 Neruda’s play was based on the real life of a Mexican emigrant in California, where racial prejudice turned him into a famous bandit, a ‘guerillero’ defying the liberal American society. In rehearsals, it became the story of music-hall artists whose popular audience judge the show so inadequate that they take over and turn it into an agit-prop piece, finding a use Neruda had not for his dead hero. Next stop, Lyon. The TNP opened with Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, and a new version of Toller. Massacre, of which more later, aimed to express a double continuity, with Planchon’s Henry IV, and with Chéreau’s exploration of violent upheavals. Tankred Dorst’s Toller represents ‘scenes of a German revolution’ that led to the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic in November 1919. Created by anarchist intellectuals and socialist workers, governed by the playwright Ernst Toller, it was overtaken by

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Bolsheviks, and destroyed three weeks later by the same counter-revolutionary Freikorps who crushed the parallel Spartakist uprising in Berlin. What Toller had called ‘the Bavarian revolution of love’ turned into a nightmare, sowing the seeds of Nazism in Bavaria.64 This aborted revolution was the prototype of many others in Chéreau’s work. It also showed his obsessive need both to refine and to avoid replication, constantly rework, open new windows in the performed text. The two productions in Milan and Villeurbanne differed significantly: the first one insisted on the failure of the revolution, the TNP version showcased all the elements of the attempt that might have succeeded. In Milan, Chéreau had sharply contrasted Toller the socialist poet and playwright with Eugen Leviné, leader of the communist government that succeeded Toller’s; in Villeurbanne he lit up what they had in common.65 To an interviewer who found the play ‘excessively didactic’, he replied that was often the sad case with modern plays: ‘The problem is one can’t play Marivaux or Shakespeare all the time, thinking to oneself, “Shakespeare? Even if the staging is bad, the play will do the job”.’66 This was a work in progress, in line with Dorst’s several revisions of his text: ‘I had stressed what separates Leviné and Toller, now I prefer to show what draws them close. I had not taken note of the play’s visionary aspect, it is a utopia come into being.’67 When the production came to the Odéon, he took over the part of Toller, with whom he felt affinities. With Edward Bond’s Lear, one of his Villeurbanne productions, Chéreau still harped on the theme of failed revolutions, as he had with Toller: ‘We need to admit that deviations of socialism can exist, there is this awful perversion. We must feed on this also to return to the dream of the Revolution. . . . Feed on despair.’

2 First Elizabethan Encounters

Chéreau declared from the start a resolute hostility to ‘archaeological’ or ‘fossilized’ theatre. His interest for the past concentrated on those moments of history when a new world begins to emerge, on those bloody transitions from one age to the next, well designed to hold mirrors up to the present. Such transitions, caused by political assassinations, the deposing of a monarch, fratricide, civil wars, combined a crisis of values and a crisis of representation.1 What captured his fancy was not so much the artistic and intellectual achievements of the Renaissance as its convulsions – the religious wars that climaxed with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres.2 Archaic figures and distant traumatic events must be reabsorbed in today’s problematics, the transfer of power from political to economic forces, the ever relevant clash of ideologies. Layers of historical references bridging the gap between then and now mix with theatrical references. Machinery, items of scenery and props recall earlier productions, like the refugees’ suitcases that travel from Richard II through Massacre to Hamlet’s modern company of actors. Recollections of Lear and La Dispute haunt the Bayreuth Ring. The characters of Les Paravents walk through the empty frame that stood for Richard II ’s mirror; the ritual of insults exchanged between Saïd’s Mother and Khadidja will inspire his chorus of wailing queens in Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments).

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On a Greek market – Le Prix de la révolte Shakespeare first appeared as a guest star in Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir, set in the Colonels’ Greece.3 A group of students are rehearsing scenes from Shakespeare when rebellion erupts in the streets, demanding ‘power to the workers’. They have chosen Shakespeare because no one can better tell the sound and the fury, the full horror of war. One of them crudely expresses what may well have been Chéreau’s own feelings at that point: ‘Shakespeare is a fantastic tool, one uses it to tell things about the present, it is a firm basis which has huge dramatic qualities and enables us to show more effectively.’4 When the street demonstrations turn into a violent fight with the police, Shakespeare no longer seems adequate to the students; they want to show a real revolution. After a debate over the need to defend the classics, they give up cultural heritage in favour of a play written on the spur of the moment about the present situation. Later they decide that to act effectively they must give up the theatre and join the mutinous crowds. Chéreau kept notes on all his productions since Lycée Louisle-Grand, and his archives at IMEC allow us a glimpse of his thought processes from an early age onwards.5 Some twenty loose pages of comments and sketches concerning Prix de la révolte are written on the back of chequered table napkins, others on paper with the heading Théâtre de Sartrouville. On one leaf are neatly pinned samples of material for each actor’s costume, in delicate shades of rosewood, taupe, mauve and grey. Another has eight different handwritten versions of his opening paragraph for the programme. On others, short biographies of the historical characters, a record of Greece’s demography and economic dependence on the United States, a typescript of Copi’s then-unpublished play Eva Perón.6 Notes on the first rehearsal with Dimitriádis, dated 9 August 1968, begin with a question on ‘. . . the meaning of Shakespeare: the

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unnecessary heroism, have Dimitriádis explain it, maybe it is not just cruelty, suffering, but a historical attitude, Christian sacrifice, those great barbarous sacrifices Shakespeare talked about.’ On the contrary, Shakespeare must serve them here as their Christian reference, a very modern one. Since only extracts are to be played, these will add up to an intellectual collage, which must be ‘perfect as far as the strength of their feelings is concerned’, and performed in theatre of cruelty mode, ‘an elementary theatre, very simple, very baroque.’ The note dated ‘Sunday 11 August’ discusses the murder of Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar: ‘What needs to be heard about Shakespeare: narrate the apology of the sacrifice that remained unused. The only one that theatre people find useful.’ The other kind ‘is a sort of barbarous sacrifice, people driven to erase themselves physically, give up the fight, and who live in a sadomasochistic relation with their friends.’ Something akin to Beckett’s Godot, he goes on, plus something more. Five days later, on 16 August, after a run through, he harps again on ‘Dimitri’s Shakespeare’ and the need to give it a perfect theatrical form, which applies to the cruelty theatre generally: ‘It will secrete true but general and poetic meanings but at the same time be completely absurd.’ Again he meditates on ‘a long series of useless sacrifices. The only relation that exists among men is the relation between executioner and victim.’ All sacrifices are offered to punish or atone for a fault, then must be given a meaning: ‘save one’s sons and so on.’ Shakespeare is a popular, not a revolutionary writer. In the students’ minds, and in Chéreau’s questioning, the theatre aims to be a reading tool of today’s world. On 19 August, he notes: ‘Show the students are students, not actors. Show how they mix up ideologies, how from the depths of an intellectual slump they manage to understand a few things.’ The young people’s rebellion, a psychodrama, is braced against ‘the most odious of governments: the paternalism of an ageing queen.’ The confrontation of Shakespeare with a modern play, of two great historical moments, is but one of the contradictions to be solved dialectically. In the playtext, a marginal note bears

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a reminder to stress from the very first the antagonism between reality, what is happening in the street, and a theatrical mythology engaged in a last desperate fight to preserve its erstwhile inviolate space:7 ‘The theatre is fighting its last battle.’8 Young Chéreau’s will to make the characters behave as real people, not actors, to strip the theatre of its masks, will develop into a concern for naturalism very much his own, against a dominant style of acting that stressed theatricality. Chéreau’s numerous minute revisions of the text aim to give the language a more direct and contemporary tone. The students improvise, rehearse, discuss the sacrifice of Talbot and his son in Henry VI Part One, the fathers and sons of Part Three, the litanies of Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth in Richard III, the cutting off of Titus Andronicus’ hand and his meditation on the death of a fly, the murder of Cinna and the false news of defeat that leads to Cassius’ suicide in Julius Caesar. On being warned of an official visit, the students wonder if this means war or peace, and seek political answers in Coriolanus. The slogans chanted outside initiate an argument among them, echoing the recent debates of May 1968 on culture and revolution. Should they help by awakening workers to consciousness through their theatrical venture, perform in the street, perhaps, or start their own political education and join the fighters? Some of them want to carry on with their rehearsal, hoping to fuel the rebellion with their own scenes of war, and they start another dispute over the matter to be performed. Why put on old plays when there is such dramatic material at hand? Shakespeare is too far away, too inefficient; he is abandoned in favour of a project featuring the murder of Lambrakis that will lead to the Colonels’ junta, and the larger theme of ‘politics as assassination’.9 While these radical intellectuals argue, dissecting their contradictions, Queen Frederika makes a grand entrance with her son Constantino. The king declares he adores Shakespeare, and proves it by quoting the first lines of Sonnet 17, ‘Who will believe my verse in time to come’. He treats the students to a shorter biography of the poet, after which they offer to perform

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the dismemberment of Cinna. The queen decides to play her own part in the show and attempts to charm them back into order. When demonstrators invade the theatre, she refuses to leave the stage, strips herself of her clothes and jewellery to give them to ‘her people’, but it is too late, the people have seized power. For a time. Michelle Marquais’ performance as the Queen so nearly won the day that it threatened to upset the design: ‘Queen Frederika and her son the future king of Spain stood before us’, splendidly played by the future interpreters of Quartett, Attoun remembers. Chéreau meant to depict the demagogy of those in power and the surrender of intellectuals. He had in mind Evita Perón, a former actress with touches of Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland, ‘humble daughter of the great people’, who ‘wants to be a Shakespearean queen’.10 At the end of the debates, some of the contradictions having been solved, the students join the workers in the street, very much what their Parisian models had attempted to do months earlier by offering their support to the Renault workers’ strike in Boulogne-Billancourt. The political situation in Greece openly mirrored the situation in France. The soundtrack included recordings of the May demonstrations. Queen Frederika’s dance with a CGT trade union leader over the corpse of a demonstrator infuriated the Communist Party. The dialogues, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech observed, seemed to have been rewritten by a collaborative effort of the company in the light of recent events, not without lucid irony, to stress the point that power, any power, needs spectacle. Chéreau himself was in search of a form that would ally beauty and utility, aesthetics and politics: ‘So many tableaux, so many theoretical and formal questions, so many rough papers striving towards this “other thing” the theatre wants to be to serve the revolution.’11 Despite his obvious inexperience, this is fully a man of the theatre, a director to be reckoned with, Poirot-Delpech diagnosed, one whose every invention, however provocative, is consistent with his design. The parallel with the conclusion of May 1968 hardly needed stressing. The whole production recalled the great Utopian

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slogan of those intoxicating weeks: ‘Take your desires for realities’. To the author Dimitriádis, his Prix de la révolte was a ‘proposition de pièce’ (just a proposal). It was more a sketch than a full-fledged play, leaving much space for improvisation, and for Chéreau’s freedom: the ‘cruel scenes’ rehearsed by the students ended in a critical approach of the ‘Cruelty theatre’ that urgently called for a revision, not, as was originally planned, through a parody of the Living Theater, but by questioning and reinventing ‘everything’.12 Part of Artaud’s Cruelty manifesto suited the young director perfectly: Artaud wanted to scrap the notion of masterpieces designed ‘for a self-styled elite and not understood by the general public’, for they are ‘literary, that is to say, fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time.’ Down with the fixed masterpieces of bourgeois conformism; ‘it is not upon the stage that the true is to be sought nowadays, but in the street’. Since the Renaissance, we have been accustomed to ‘a purely descriptive and narrative theatrestorytelling psychology’: ‘Shakespeare himself is responsible for this aberration and this decline’, it is he and his imitators who ‘have gradually insinuated the idea of art for art’s sake, with art on one side and life on the other’. Worse, our veneration for their beautiful works ‘petrifies us, deadens our responses, and prevents us from making contact with that underlying power, call it thought-energy, the life force’. To purify the theatre, one needed to behave with the audience like snake charmers, first by crude means that would gradually be refined, music, light, violent physical images, and the dynamism of the action. Artaud conceded there might be a risk in his programme ‘of inducing trances’, ‘but I do propose something to get us out of our marasmus, instead of continuing to complain about it, and about the boredom, inertia, and stupidity of everything’. Where Chéreau may have begun to differ was with Artaud’s sweeping statement that ‘Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.’13 The questioning appeared, as Poirot-Delpech

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had noted, through the variety of styles. Chéreau’s ‘cultural heritage’ was displayed through a large range of musical references, from Handel to Pierre Henry, ‘Naughty Lola’ and ‘Swanee River’, a ‘medley’ that most of the reviewers found over-rich and overreaching. Vincent remembers the scenes from Shakespeare as a form of ‘propedeutics’, rough papers for Chéreau’s Richard II. The staged argument about the relevance of Elizabethan plays to our times continued in the newspapers. Several reviewers detected a new personality of the stage, and the fact that the playwright was no longer its undisputed master. The drama critic of Combat read the production as a return to commedia dell’arte performed by agit-prop thinkers, which might be one of the ways open to future dramatic expression, but would then require a change in our vocabulary: ‘the true author becomes the director, on whom everything depends’. He also felt there was rather too much Shakespeare in the show, with extracts too long for a play since all they did, tiresomely, was to point out that human relations are ruled by violence and cunning.14 None of the reviewers suggested or discussed possible parallels between Shakespeare’s plays and the modern one, or with the present situation, like Queen Margaret’s complicity in the murder of the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in Henry VI Part Two. Chéreau himself did not comment on his choice of extracts, but would return to the first Henriad years later when teaching the students of the Conservatoire, the French equivalent of RADA . At the time of the Prix de la révolte he merely pointed out that it was his first production of a Shakespeare text: of his three-and-a-half-hour show, an hour and a quarter came from Shakespeare. Some of the reviewers thought that was far too much,15 but such reservations would never deter him from giving detractors more of the same. That he should make the point that this was his first Shakespeare, which no French novice so far had attempted at such an early age, 24, was evidence enough that he already had others in mind, and indeed Shakespeare would prove a life-long companion.

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The singing sands – Richard II King Richard II is brought on stage by a winch. His courtiers carry him round in a chair, a visual image of the feudal pyramid of power, and run at a fast trot to dodge the dying Gaunt’s litter. His royal feet are never allowed to touch the ground until he is brought down in the ‘base court’ and literally deposed from his seat.16 When defeated, he tries to escape with his crown and regalia in a hamper, like an emigrant. A crane seizes him on a platform forty feet above ground and brings him down on the sand-covered floor. Chéreau’s earliest guides to Shakespeare’s histories were Strehler and Planchon. Riccardo II had been Strehler’s first attempt at Shakespeare in 1948. It would also be Chéreau’s, after some balancing over Henry V, in which he planned to include scenes from Henry IV, and have Desarthe play the title part. Planchon, another brilliant pioneer, had opened his first Villeurbanne season in 1959 with a Brechtian two-part Henry IV entitled ‘Le prince’ and ‘Falstaff’, productions recalled by Chéreau in his work notes.17 Of special significance was Planchon’s innovative approach to what French Brechtians called ‘la fable’, the dramatic core of the play, not who the characters are, but what they do. It was he who coined one of Chéreau’s favourite phrases, ‘machine à jouer’ (acting tool), for a set designed to allow the fluid unfolding of a play.18 Strehler spoke of Shakespeare as a tyrannical author, demanding total commitment; his advice in confronting the poet was ‘Get under the surface of the text, but never go against it or abuse it.’19 The aim, he explained in the programme of Riccardo II, was not an antiquarian reconstruction, but a fullness of theatrical language that would both be appropriate to Shakespeare and valid for the twentieth century. This involved research in Elizabethan theatrical conditions, and a borrowing of Laurence Olivier’s two-tiered ‘wooden O’ in the film Henry V. Ninety actors, an ambitious Brechtian company ensemble, were brought on the small (Piccolo) stage to embody the required fullness. For Strehler, as it had for

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Vilar, staging Richard II was a political act, ‘not as in the Elizabethan theatre in the context of regicide, but in the very nature of the performance itself’, reinventing the place of popular theatre within a community after the restrictions of fascist propaganda.20 The transference of monarchy evoked Italy’s recent transfer of authority from Mussolini’s forces to those of the Christian democrats. The play had a key role in Chéreau’s political development. Like his masters, in the early part of his career he was intent on breaking the surface to reach the narrative core and if need be, dislocate and restructure the text, getting rid of elements that did not fit in the new design, a lack of respect that would often cause uproar. Yet there is no arbitrariness in the process, as Odette Aslan notes – he does not invent but ‘cruelly raises the veil’ to search the sub-text: he develops seeds dormant there, draws it towards the present, to its ultimate consequences, and focuses on its theatrical actualization.21 Each revival of a production opens the way to more rewriting, restructuring, reannotating the texts. Richard II had not been performed in French since Jean Vilar’s 1947 production at the opening of the Avignon Festival. In 1964, writing on the fourth centenary of Shakespeare, Dort thought there was no successor able to confront the English dramatist: ‘Our stage directors seem actually naked in front of Shakespeare. The heroic and tragic style Vilar had used to put on Richard II in Avignon, almost twenty years ago, has misfired. We have now more or less broken with this brand of Shakespeare. But has he been replaced?’ Dort thinks not – all directors hesitate between the aesthetics of the empty stage and a Brechtian occupation of space in a well-defined historical context. The results are mongrel, blurred representations: what is needed is not a compromise between the two styles but a new style integrating both, and somehow generated by both.22 Dort, a Brecht specialist who founded the magazine Théâtre populaire with Roland Barthes, was a highly influential link between the university and the theatre. At the time of his comment on the paucity of Shakespeare in France, he was

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teaching at the Sorbonne Institut d’Etudes théâtrales, where freelance Chéreau and Vincent occasionally sat among the students. In his own memoirs, Michel Bataillon (Planchon’s dramaturg) records Dort’s wish, and observes that these expectations will be met with Planchon’s Richard III in 1966 at the Avignon Festival, and four years later, Chéreau’s Richard II.23 The two directors shared a strong relation with Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, because, Chéreau will confirm, he inherited it from Planchon: ‘Je me suis nourri de lui’ (I fed on him). And both of them fed on Orson Welles.24 Planchon, before Chéreau, ‘needed to show, to get across, changes, apparent contradictions’.25 Bataillon, a devoted chronicler of Planchon’s work, puts their two Richards on an equal level, yet there is no comparison between the reception each received. Planchon’s was applauded as a masterpiece, Chéreau’s raised fierce opposition, yet in the long run, it left a deeper mark on French stage history. In the footsteps of Chéreau’s epochmaking show, every aspiring young director of the next two decades would want to ‘do a Shakespeare’.26 Among the unexciting productions decried by Dort, there were hardly any histories apart from Richard III. Shortly after Strehler’s Gioco dei potenti in Milan, Jean-Louis Barrault made an isolated attempt with a two-part Henry VI at the Odéon in 1966 that left him with bitter memories: ‘All we received for it were snubs. The reviewers tore us apart. The public, influenced by them, showed only indifference.’27 Gilles Sandier, for one, compared it unfavourably with young Chéreau’s Héritier de village which had all the qualities ‘so sadly wanting in Henry VI at the Odéon’.28 But then came Jan Kott, whose grand mechanism of history literally conquered the French stage. Rare would be those at the time, apart from Richard Marienstras, to point out publicly that Shakespeare is and is not our contemporary, that Kott’s reading of King Lear transported it to the absurdist world of the 1960s – the post-Auschwitz, post-Stalinian world that would make the background of Edward Bond’s Lear. To Kott, Marienstras argues, the individual features of kings mattered less than the

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relentless necessity that presided over their ascent and fall. Politicians spoke in the name of values, but values indefectibly found themselves on the side of the strongest: ‘from this perspective, tragedy resides in the crushing of all sacredness by the Grand Mechanism, in the silence of the gods over violence, in the sudden disclosure that the order of values is but pure fantasy’.29 Among the few who detected weaknesses in Kott’s reading of Shakespeare, Chéreau privately thought his Grand Mechanism reductive. History does not repeat itself in Shakespeare’s plays, he writes during the preparatory phases of Richard II, the Grand Mechanism exists only in Kott’s head: ‘it is but a mere non dialectical reading of history: true it is that the murders and the story endings repeat themselves but Shakespeare’s realistic art also shows us how History gives birth to and how the repetitive cycle brings in new ideas, new possibilities and different ideologies, through which are forged a people, a consciousness and a state.’ Kott’s was the simplified Shakespeare of the students in Prix de la révolte. Now the experiment must be renewed and taken further: the simple means, the violence and lyricism of the chorus and of the form must be used to tell the contradictions of history, a mechanism that helps the great to build their power and the people to earn a living with their wounds. Again, the poet is a sure guide: ‘in the logical shaping of his construction, Shakespeare is infallible. This is our working hypothesis. The method: ingenuous analysis. Always ask ourselves the question: WHY ?’30 Planchon had depicted ‘brutal machiavellianism’ in his Henry IV, exposing England’s grandees as a team of gangsters. Along with Planchon, Chéreau’s notes reveal another strong influence: André Müller’s ‘Zwei Shakespeare-Lesarten’,31 which Chéreau translates and argues with over sixteen handwritten pages. It is to Müller that he owes his reading of Richard II as the passage from one feudal age to another more mercantile one, Richard’s vain attempt to break a rebellious nobility, his court’s systemic financial difficulties, the resulting rise to power of an emergent class of tradesmen. Müller does not believe

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in Kott’s blind political mechanism: Bolingbroke makes the necessary step towards the kind of absolute power that best fits the interests of his class. But Chéreau points out that there is no connection in the text between the loss of his inheritance and his landing at the head of an army: he is right, there is no scene break between the death of Gaunt and the news that his son has landed. Where Müller thinks Bolingbroke had designs on the crown from the start, that his landing was planned long ahead, Chéreau detects an adventurer whom the frustrated nobility fashion into a legitimate candidate against Richard. The king’s rapid surrender comes as a surprise, he gives in one hour what Bolingbroke only expected to gain in a distant future, and this surprise element needs to be fully played out. Bolingbroke’s friends are but briefly allied by a common interest, a point well made by the general wrangling at 4.1. When Bagot is arrested, his entrance tied up in a straightjacket gives the signal of a fierce stampede in which Carlisle, the venerable prelate, ends ‘arse over ears’. The minions’ death, half naked with their clothes falling over their loins, hands tied, brutally beaten, reflects the establishment of a new moral order, where business will reign supreme. Still, Chéreau insists that he will not show monsters nor allow pathos in the characters’ relationships: this is never a matter of personal hatreds but of political necessity. Here follows a long digression on the next parts of the Henriad, with memories of Planchon’s Henry IV. The history of Prince Hal, ‘the boss’s son’, attracts a comparison with De Gaulle’s successor, Pompidou, who advertised continuity while contradicting his ‘father’ and debased the French currency. Having brought in civil war, Henry IV cannot restore order himself. His attempt to divert resentments with a crusade is a complete failure, but his son’s French campaign is a complete success. Hal’s team are a pack of young wolves, as ambiguous as Richard’s minions: theirs is also ‘a pederastic world where brutes and army generals fraternise in their attractive grace.’ Before the battle, both sides prepare their bodies to the promised violent feast. Henry’s harangue to his

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army sounds like Bonaparte’s – presumably in Abel Gance’s added soundtrack – and like the speech from Henry VI he had included in Prix de la révolte, demagogic and aggressively naïve. Henry V takes place between two epics filled with change: by tacit agreement between the two kings, a clear process of colonization ensues, with Catherine thrown in the arms of the victor by her mother, Queen Isabel. Perhaps men should play the women’s parts, and play them virile, like rapacious birds of prey, to show their will to power. The exploitation of the people continues unchanged until a resistance to the occupant is organized, when the people take things into their hands, in Henry VI. If those notes did not serve here, they would in the later Fragments performed by the Conservatoire students. If the conquest of power was relatively easy, keeping it firm and stable proves far more complex. The adventurer Bolingbroke has read Machiavelli and his behaviour is political, hence wholly open to change, whereas Richard remains irretrievably naïve, with the same illusions on a world he cannot understand. Chéreau notes at the beginning of rehearsals he has watched Visconti’s Götterdämmerung the day before and means to revisit this morbid vision of a society torn by personal ideologies, its ethics on the wane: ‘describe nothing serenely, show each law getting tougher – even Bolingbroke’s humanism must remain tense and aggressive.’ Hans Memling painted the legend of Saint Ursula with the means of his own time and found its brutality in the contemporary range of artistic forms. A director must do the same, reinvent the Renaissance through Verdi and Berlioz, tell the decadence of power with composite forms, ‘a sensual Renaissance that orders itself in the cold wood architecture of the former period, i.e. ourselves facing Gothic Shakespeare’. Its colours would be white and mauve grey, the slate grey of Memling, a world of grey stones with a note of creamy warmth borrowed from Italy. The costumes must be kept simple and tell specific things about the world of the king and his minions – ‘la pédérastie un peu gigolaille’ (faggotish pederasty) – about the characters’ rank, feudal lords, adventurer,

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the nobility in immaculate white rotting from inside. Scattered among the written notes are sketches of machinery, dented wheel, winch, pulleys, drawbridge, and a little Renaissance window overlooking the courtyard, drawn after models he found at the Bibliothèque des Arts et Métiers, especially the machines of the military engineer Agostino Ramelli who had served the Medici and the Duke of Anjou.32 Chéreau saw Richard II as the political tragedy of Renaissance humanism, which stripped the world of its illusions. After the students’ aborted attempt in Prix de la révolte, his engagement with Shakespeare properly began then, when his innovative Richard II made the young director nationally famous overnight,33 and caused his translator, the renowned poet Pierre Leyris, to denounce him publicly as an iconoclast for a production more akin to ‘music-hall, circus, and pankration’ than to proper theatre.34 Chéreau’s major commitment was undoubtedly elsewhere. Indeed, at that stage, he was more interested in the context, one of those ‘révolutions bafouées’ (spurned revolutions) that haunt his work, than in the subtleties of Leyris’s euphuisms. Does he feel he is serving Shakespeare’s text as exactly as possible, an interviewer asks, and is answered that a director’s speech runs parallel with an author’s and may not be strictly similar: by showing Shakespeare in today’s light, in the present tense, this director shows that the poet has much to tell us now.35 The aim was not to achieve historical authenticity, but ‘to recreate a Renaissance both imaginary and plausible, composite and violent’.36 In his pungent political reading, the play is a near didactic exposure of a historical mechanism, almost the text-book illustration of a chapter on Machiavelli. It shows a moment of crisis, internal to power, when the values of an age grow useless, yet still need to be defended, a crisis interiorized by Richard. The dominant ideology becomes an empty thing which some desperately cling to, creating violence, ironies, and a very bitter brand of humour. The king does not understand the deep changes at work and no longer knows how to govern. Against his despotic anarchy, the feudal lords believe they have

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found a providential man among their own ranks, who also happens to be a victim of the former regime.37 With the development of foreign trade, a new economy has emerged. The old feudal class is retreating before the rise of a new power, money, and instead of occupying the political centre of the realm, monarchy becomes its banker, invents new ways of spending and wasting, new taxes to pay for pleasures. Observing this decadence, Shakespeare drew from it an ambiguous and incomplete moral lesson, eliminating from the design all the political forces that did not have a place in his purpose: political apocalypses are to be expected from attacks on the inviolability of the monarch, Chéreau further explains, but in an undertone Shakespeare narrates the stuttering establishment of a truly absolute power that would disarm the feudal lords; with a hint of sadness, he suggests how necessary and bloody this birth would be. In other words, the Renaissance poet was sketching both a historical imperative and its first ideological defences.38 A Chéreau production, each of young Chéreau’s productions, begins with the creation of a space. He had built the set and props of Prix de la révolte himself. Those for Richard II were designed with the assistance of the painter/architect Richard Peduzzi whom he had met in the meantime, whose tall structures would become their trademark. With Jacques Schmidt doing the costumes, André Serré the sound engineer and André Diot in charge of the lighting, the artistic team that will accompany Chéreau’s career comes into being then, along with several actors of his future films and theatre productions. As in all Peduzzi’s ulterior designs, the set’s the thing wherein to catch the story of the play. Director and scenographer work separately, then compare notes when they have a sketch in mind, and generally find their imaginations followed similar paths. Each stage design is singular, yet they observe constant principles, developing from one production to the next: ‘cosmic, connecting vertical and horizontal, realistic/sensuous, theatrical, anachronistic, socialized, binary/dialectic’.39 Here, at the onset of their partnership, the courtyard of a feudal

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palace is covered in seventeen tons of sand like a bullpit, framed between the huge pillars of a castle jail. Pictorial references to Zurbarán and Piero della Francesca extend the medieval world towards the Renaissance. The wood machines drawn from Leonardo, the engineer Ramelli, or Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, connect the machinery of history to our age of industrialization, aggressive drawbridges, winches, moving platforms that can serve for burials, sieges, board meetings, depositions: ‘an empty space for the intellectual idlenesses of petty power seekers, offering material support to the political game, and space for the proud violence of feelings’.40 The acting space, filled with Meyerholdian rigging, is governed not so much by Richard or Bolingbroke as by theatrical technique: This fictive space will enable us to establish throughout the acting a theatrical convention: at once closed arena and deserted home, it will invent the distance between the castle and the open field, the length of the vestibules, the height of the empty rooms, and raise from the dust the war machines and the coffins needed for the feasts marking each change in power, it will show the musty pit where the fighting will take place between the foxes and cocks intent on ruling its ground.41 Historical and theatrical referents are fused in a symbol ‘that spells the spirit, but not the letter, of our modernity’: the workings of the machinery in open sight configure ‘an image of the feverish activity of men in search of power, aiming to master the mechanisms of a mutating society’.42 The scenography exposes the struggle between those who play the comedy of power with lucidity and bitterness, Richard’s minions, and those who take decisive action, Bolingbroke’s. Two worlds are in conflict, intellectuals, kings and children on one side, pressure groups, thugs and gangs on the other, leaving the last word to physical strength and violence, and a new society still to be invented – for Chéreau

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cannot bow before this dichotomy, Dort observes, he must find an exit out of their closed stage world and internecine destruction. But will there still be room for the theatre in this new society waiting to be built outside, or is Chéreau condemned to endlessly repeating the end of the ancient world, torn between play and violence? The question will return many times in the critics’ anxieties, who feel mutatis mutandis what Dort had felt, that ‘through Richard II , it is his own theatrical activity that Chéreau ruthlessly executes.’43 Anne-Françoise Benhamou will diagnose a ‘remise en crise acharnée’ during the Nanterre period, a relentless self-questioning worked up to critical point, but if Dort is right, the point of crisis was always there.44 Indeed, one could argue an early affinity with Shakespeare’s genius as W. H. Auden saw it: ‘A major poet is always willing to risk failure, to look for a new rhetoric.’ Chéreau unquestionably belongs with those ‘engaged in perpetual endeavours. The moment such an artist learns to do something, he stops and tries to do something else, something new – like Shakespeare, or Wagner, or Picasso.’45 The cast also suggested inklings of a permanent company. Gérard Desarthe, the future Gravedigger’s Boy, Peer Gynt and Hamlet, played Bolingbroke. The Duchess of York, Michelle Marquais, who was Queen Frederika in Prix de la révolte would return in Töller, Quartett and Rêve d’automne. Hotspur, Hugues Quester, would be Azor in La Dispute, and have his eyes pierced in La Chair de l’orchidée. The actor of the title-role having defected, and other recruits proved unsatisfactory, Chéreau took on the part, perhaps a reminiscence of the Louis-le-Grand days when he filled in the gaps of the cast. Coming after the public darling Gérard Philipe’s performance of the part for Vilar, ‘the most researched, penetrating and lucid of compositions’, the La Croix reviewer recalls,46 it was an impossible challenge. Daniel Emilfork, who played a monstrously comic Duke of York, coached Patrice in the part. He detected in the character of Richard a mixture of childishness and brutality, eager to charm, which Chéreau remembers as quite close to his own way of managing his actors at the time. Acting, he thought

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then, was just showing, demonstrating, not feeling and diving into oneself in search of the role as he would later.47 What he could not get, he would extract forcefully, and was himself exposed to Emilfork’s harsh judgement: ‘You may be pleased with what you have done, but it was complete shit.’ He played the king as a provocative hedonist, with a broken delivery, more youthful than royal, disoriented and vulnerable. This capricious Richard would like to change the world, clean it of its old feudal predators, be an absolute king, but he finds himself powerless and reduced to acting a part, wearing the face of a sad clown, whose reign is only a comedy.48 A tragic white clown, playing king and beggar in succession. The mirror of the deposition scene is an empty wooden frame, which reflects his own emptiness when he looks at himself, through which he jumps, facing the audience, to the tune of ‘Some of These Days’. Here a handwritten ‘Gloria Swanson’ in the margin of the typescript text suggests an analogy with Sunset Boulevard – ‘I’m ready for my closeup, Mr De Mille’, as she climbs down her grand staircase to prison. Richard’s entrances are accompanied by Maria Callas singing ‘Suicidio’ in La Gioconda, or by a 1920s tango. The music, as eclectic as the pictorial references, includes Janis Joplin and Pink Floyd: it does not aim to actualize the play but bring to it an added colour of sensibility, describe ‘the end of a world and a life style’.49 In the farewell scene, the footbridge on which the royal couple stand splits into two halves that move inexorably away while they are held back by gaolers, suspended over the opening chasm. Exton comes in armed with an axe, throws Richard on the ground and buries his head in the sand. Enter Henry IV, wearing the same royal cloak, carried in the same chair. Richard’s attempts at absolutism are defeated by two allied pressure groups, nobility and trade. The decline of majesty raises to the throne, amid the sound of boots, the ‘providential’ leader who will clean up the refuse and impose order in the infantile arena. In this part, Desarthe brought out not so much the brutality as the opportunism of the political condottiere. At the end of the play, he begins to reproduce the mimics and

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gestures of Richard, enacting as much as performing the royal function. On the ‘clownish’ white faces of the actors, noticed in most reviews, Georges Banu adds a more significant, Brechtian layer: Karl Valentin’s suggestion that the soldiers of Edward II in the battle scene were scared, pale-faced. Brecht translated it by giving them chalk-white faces, and would repeatedly use this device, always associated with decay and death.50 Chéreau’s reference to his epic rather than psychological mode of interpretation was still unfamiliar enough in France at the time to cause discomfort to many in the audience. This Richard II got radically opposed reactions, as each Chéreau production would in the next decade. To Gilles Sandier, it was ‘superbly intelligent and superbly pagan’, the reason why, presumably, it had attracted ‘the rage of sanctimonious hypocrites and the stupidity unleashed against this show, demanding it be repressed’.51 Nicole Zand gave it loud approval in Le Monde but some of her colleagues thought it both gushing and empty praise, for want of sound critical criteria. Behind the ostensible quarrel over aesthetics, the issue was the alleged waste of public money on the likes of young Chéreau who used the decentralized theatres in a ‘spirit of provocation’.52 Jean-Jacques Gautier, Figaro’s addertongued critic, derided those public servants who ‘pour and waste millions to encourage such exhibitions in the name of Culture’. At the other end of the political spectrum, others accused Chéreau of having compromised with the government by agreeing to play at the Odéon, the theatre from which Barrault had been exiled after his support to the May 1968 movement, and they quoted Roger Blin’s prophetic anathema that whoever agreed to succeed Barrault would be a ‘lotte pourrie’ (rotten monkfish). To them, Chéreau retorted he did not have much choice, as a ‘mercenaire’ of the regime; the only alternative would have been to refuse the cultural policy of the government years ago. Since he had accepted it, he took full responsibility for his acts.53 Touching the production itself, the sympathetic reviewers applauded the energy and physical engagement of the actors,

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the tensions of each scene exposed by the bodies, limp, broken, convulsed, torn between conflicting forces, conflicting desires, constantly at risk. The unsympathetic ones, beginning with Shakespeare’s guardian of words, his translator, denounced it as a sacrilege. Pierre Leyris had brought together a team of renowned writers, among them Supervielle, Bonnefoy, Michel Butor, André du Bouchet, Pierre-Jean Jouve, to translate the complete plays for a bilingual edition, the first of its kind, by the Club Français du Livre.54 Now he violently condemned Chéreau for having dared to claim Shakespeare’s parentage ‘because he leans (with my naïve agreement, alas) on my version of the play’. This surface betrayal, combined as it was with in-depth infidelity, entitled him to pronounce the whole sorry business ‘null and void’.55 A quarter of a century later, Leyris’s wrath had not abated. His own ideal performance, he declared in an interview, would be one that wrought on today’s spectator the impression an Elizabethan Englishman would have felt at the original: ‘I abominate Planchon and Chéreau who direct in such a way that it looks modern, with an atom bomb, but this is all wrong, to me it looks idiotic.’56 Despite the aura of Leyris, his own work was not unanimously praised at the time: the reviewer of Les Temps modernes thought it a mistake to have chosen this translation which ‘is no doubt faithful, but thoroughly untheatrical, finicky, and breathes heavily, in its vain attempt to restore the progress of the English sentence instead of breaking and remodelling it where need be’. To Gautier in Le Figaro, the text reached heights of gibberish. Le Nouvel Observateur, the new fashionable weekly, was even more outspoken, quoting passages hard to pronounce, an over-abundant use of the perfect tense, which in French practice is reserved for written language, and unwarranted additions to the mannerisms of the original text.57 Leyris struck back with an open letter, explaining how exactly one must proffer phrases like ‘le Prince oint’, that just needed an extra vowel to be easily tackled by an actor: it was the only apt translation for the concrete term ‘anointed’, which Shakespeare had chosen in preference to the abstract

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‘sacred’.58 ‘Lorsque vous le quittâtes’ – the scorned perfect that French orality avoids – must be uttered both under the breath and with fierce intensity, like a double knife stab, to express Richard’s hatred and distrust of his exiled cousin. Shakespeare’s language at that point was still a juvenile’s, still heavily under sway of the medieval Mysteries, wary of run-on lines and slightly ponderous. In attacking his translators, critics like Dumur and Gautier were revealing their own dislike of Shakespeare. This, incidentally, was Simone de Beauvoir’s argument decades earlier against the detractors of Charles Dullin: if they found his King Lear boring, they should say so openly, and indict not the director but the author himself.59 Leyris paid lip-service to Chéreau’s talent, but maintained that like his friend and mentor Planchon, ‘he does not care in the least for what Shakespeare may have wanted to say or even for what he expressly says’. Under its modern exterior, the director’s disregard for the authorial intention made his show as obsolete as the happy-ending Othello of Ducis, the French Nahum Tate. Apart from the bitter tone of the reply, the poet raised a dilemma that had beset Shakespeare’s translators for decades: should one translate for readers or for an audience in the theatre? In prose or verse? Using today’s idiom or flavouring it with linguistic archaisms? The next generation led by Jean-Michel Déprats, Vincent’s chosen translator, would attempt to meet the challenge with translations at once literary and adapted both to the actors’ and to the listeners’ capacities.60 In Chéreau’s case, two typescript versions of the text show a quantity of punctual changes, from ‘my liege’ to ‘my sovereign’, and re-phrasings that simplified or suppressed most of its original mannerisms without altering the structure of the sentences. What Dort had deplored about directors of Shakespeare could well have applied to the critics, who were obviously not all ready for Shakespeare. And definitely not for this kind of Shakespeare: admirers of the Bard accused Chéreau of hatred for the great authors, whom he only brought on stage to destroy.61 To the reviewer of L’Aurore, Richard II was definitely

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FIGURE 3 Two phases of Chéreau’s text for the programme of Richard II, 1970. Fonds Chéreau, archives IMEC .

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not one of Shakespeare’s best plays. The plot could be told in five lines, and surely did not deserve four hours of performance; an hour or two would be plenty, all its useless digressions needed to be cut, as had always been the custom. If we are to believe the reviewers, the audience often laughed instead of being moved by Shakespeare’s lines. With remarkable insight, Jacques Lemarchand predicted Chéreau would give his full measure when he found a playwright he would understand and want to serve, instead of treating him as a born enemy like Molière or Shakespeare. Dumur observed it was the first time a French director, following in the footsteps of Strehler or Brook, dared to break Shakespeare free from the Romantic tradition that still ruled in France. He thought Leyris, instead of disowning him publicly, should have been grateful to Chéreau who made the difficult choice of performing the complete text, written in Leyris’s no less difficult idiom. Why did Chéreau choose Leyris in the first place? Perhaps because he needed this ‘out-of-tune, euphuistic, alienating language to stand in the face of violent clashes, ambitions and unruly appetites’.62 Or possibly, Catherine TreilhouBalaudé suggests, out of faithfulness to the Shakespeare of his adolescence: the Club Français du Livre translated by contemporary poets, including Bonnefoy’s Hamlet.63 As for Chéreau, he would always advertise a preference for a writer’s text, however far from the original, over the most competent translator’s. He complained the critics had not tried to understand what he attempted to do.64 And yet he had explained it at length in the programme where he outlined his ‘Esquisse d’une théorie du pouvoir’, and developed it in numerous interviews with the press. Actually this ‘esquisse’ – a sketch – went through several stages of annotated manuscript and typed versions before it went to print, showing as elsewhere Chéreau’s minute attention to the least comma. He was looking for fault lines in the text, digging into the characters’ thoughts behind their words, aiming to flush out the birth and growth of ideologies, expose their strategies and cynicism. ‘I wanted to tell the story in a very concrete and linear manner without

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cutting one line of the text’:65 ‘to tell the story, tell it well’, narrate it through compelling images, would always be his aim, repeatedly proclaimed at each new production. However offensive Chéreau’s brutal treatment may have appeared, Shakespeare won unprecedented popularity in the theatre. Within a decade, he would upstage Molière as the playwright most frequently performed in France.

Water music – Le Massacre à Paris Chéreau’s next encounter with Elizabethan drama was on his return to France at Planchon’s invitation, after three years in Italy. During his time as a guest at the Piccolo Teatro, all his proposals were turned down by Grassi, who decided on the choice of plays, yet he enjoyed working in a well-run establishment, with an excellent technical team. While in Italy, he had complained that the actors were all awful,66 but once back in France he praised their ability to give themselves fully, moment after moment, whereas French actors need continuity.67 His last Italian production was Wedekind’s Lulu, with Strehler’s leading actress Valentina Cortese playing the innocent femme fatale and, in the part of her passionate lover the cunning Countess Geschwitz, Alida Valli, his future Catherine de Medici. Grassi was about to leave for La Scala, and Strehler to resume his place at the head of the Piccolo Teatro. This sulphurous Lulu proved crucial for Claude Stratz who would be Chéreau’s assistant throughout his time at Théâtre des Amandiers, though the assistant was already a director in his own right when he came to Nanterre. Chéreau brought back from Italy several actors, new techniques, and some of his aborted plans. His first meeting with Marlowe went back to his adolescence. Planchon remembers he met Patrice while rehearsing Edward II, when the schoolboy was introduced to the director by a painter friend of his father.68 During rehearsals of Richard II, Gérard Desarthe gave Chéreau Massacre at Paris by Marlowe to read.

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He wanted to direct it with the Piccolo Teatro, but Grassi turned down this offer like the others. Massacre would open the first season of the renovated Villeurbanne TNP on 19 May 1972, four centuries after the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which is the play’s subject. While they were waiting for the end of the extensive works on the auditorium, Chéreau declared to interviewers that Marlowe was ‘one of the few Elizabethans who do not suffer from a comparison with Shakespeare’.69 The analogy between Henri III and Edward II was obvious, like its object, a decline in central power due to the fight between political predators moved by a fierce libido. But the ‘strong, deep, underlying motive’ was the characters’ usual ‘habit of death, looking it daily in the face’. Guise’s invention of Renaissance man showed ‘death to be feared, or to overcome’ in a daily struggle we today cannot even begin to imagine70 – a leitmotiv of Chéreau’s own practice to the end. ‘My direction of the play was all done by instinct. I read about the period, and images came to me’,71 he asserted. Actually the central image came from Chéreau’s scenographer, drawn from memories of his childhood in Le Havre. ‘It was Peduzzi who said: We need to have water, tall houses moving. After that I adapted myself to the set.’72 This was a vast laguna, one foot deep, suggestive of invisible depths, overflowing sewers, with narrow footbridges and board walks, damp walls, a metallic tower. The water imposed its rhythm to the action, slowing down movements, making all attempts at escape in vain, and mimicking the wild gestures of grandiloquent orators with derisive spurts. It also spared the need to drag a quantity of corpses offstage. The bodies thrown in the Seine floated around under moving shadows, wisps of mist, flights of paper birds (brought back from Italy) when a character gave up the ghost. Chéreau had in mind modern music of the kind composed by Brecht’s friend and collaborator Hanns Eisler for Alain Resnais’ film Nuit et Brouillard, an imaged answer to Hitler’s ‘Nacht und Nebel’ directive.73 A soundscape of dirge, alarums, wind punctuated the plot, and Fiorenzo Carpi’s Milanese songs, ‘a fragile music made of very small instruments as in

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Toller’, violins and brass played by eleven musicians in the orchestra pit. Fragile, to create a contrast with the emphatic staging.74 In the background, a painted cloth showed a stormy night barely lit up by a pale moon. The chiaroscuro lighting was carefully designed in the course of rehearsals, instead of being done at night on the eve of the opening as was the usual practice. Part of the cast and assistants being Italian, the rehearsals were bilingual: not to ‘bawl out’ the stage hands, but to enrol their best efforts in a novel grand experiment, as Chéreau always would. Eighty tons of water were spilled on the stage, a technical performance noted with reservations by various viewers, who found it unwarranted by either Marlowe’s play or Jean Vauthier’s French adaptation. They also listed the copious pictorial references: Magritte men in bowler hats and overcoats, a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, Elizabethan doublets, Georges de la Tour candles, a Piranese tower, Delvaux and Chirico-like surrealist buildings mixed with traces of popular serials, Fantomas, Nick Carter, and American mafiosi movies; ‘all these quotations were fused in the intensity of his dark and violent reading of history, his own theatrical language mixing sublimity and derision’.75 The murderers carried rifles, ‘the shooting down of Protestants similar to the shooting down of Algerians during their war of independence’.76 Chéreau read extensively about the Valois reigns and the state of sixteenth-century European diplomacy. As appears from his notes, he identified a structural problem – how to transmit genuine history through the fragments conceded by Marlowe – and rapidly explained ‘on what kind of historical volcano the massacre began’, but felt no need nor wish to present the public with a genuine reconstruction. He wanted to show ‘la vraie vie’, ‘real life around the massacre and the distraught elements: wind (very strong), storm, smoke, raging waters’, and debunk the traditional views on the religious wars. Even a right-wing historian like Philippe Erlanger, with whom he wages a private one-sided argument, thinks that religion had little part in the massacre: ideology was summoned

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at the top of the State to dismantle a group of opponents. Francis I, who launched the war against the Reformation, fought the Protestants inside his realm, but allied with them outside against the emperor Charles V. The game of alliances is double-faced on both sides: Catholic France abandons Mary Queen of Scots to be reconciled with England, and tries to avoid a war with Spain by attacking the Protestants, whom England tepidly supports. As proof of their good faith they want to show foreigners a country free from all Huguenots. The hunt organized for their guests in the midst of nature must not hide the meaning of the event: a large house cleaning. Yet, Chéreau insists, there must be no hint of a genocide in the staging – hints that will resurface in La Reine Margot. Marlowe’s great strength is to show with what ease and minimal duplicity the dominant class adopts this double position, which makes his Massacre a great materialist work. His characters are moved by a ‘volonté de jouissance’ even more deadly than their political appetite.77 Guise claims to be the Church’s avenger, but he is like Aaron or Mortimer, a ‘brontosaurial condottiere’ who fully exposes the recurrent mechanism of take-over. Of course Marlowe reports the gossip he heard, and he writes from the anti-papist side. His rapid portrayals, some awkward patches in the text, can all be turned to advantage by playing up its ambiguities, suggesting that no character fully reveals his plans. Here, a reminder to ‘write again to Vauthier’ comes shortly after a list of pages that Chéreau wants revised by the translator.78 The savagery depicted in the play must be shown in the most realistic and materialistic manner: think of what happens today in Sudan, Egypt or Morocco, with no one concerned by the historical destiny of the country, nor holding the key to this great destiny. This is ‘politics brought down to the level of private interests and the fluctuation of alliances as interest dictates’. Historically, the duc de Guise’s team were an even more motley crowd than they appear on stage, ‘a whole Mitteleuropean pandemonium’, in which the Italian group stands out as more refined and more vulgar than the rest. They all use the techniques of lying speech,

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all relentlessly feign, and that must be made obvious to the audience. The reactions in the audience were so intense and so divided that chairs were broken and the stuntmen recruited for action scenes had to use shock methods to separate the fighters. Planchon had gamely agreed to play the villain of the piece, a Mephistophelian Guise in evening dress ‘like an American gangster’. He waltzed with Alida Valli as Queen Catherine, a reminder of Queen Frederika’s dance in Prix de la révolte, and led the ballet of assassinations in a mixture of grotesque and oneiric rituals, flights of paper birds, umbrellas, until he fell from the tower. The actors performed as in slow motion, weighed down by their wet clothes. A diseased Charles IX was all in white, to show off the redness of the blood oozing from his pores, as in Dumas’ novel, La Reine Margot. Marlowe’s orgy of blood-letting inspired a catalogue of the ‘thousand and one ways of dying’ except in one’s bed.79 The escapees carried their belongings in suitcases, a wink at Chéreau’s own recent nomadic condition, but more profoundly, a prop to signify the emigrants’ or refugees’ fate.80 This is when he begins to define his theatre as ‘an art of allegory’, in the way sixteenth-century painters or writers like Lope de Vega used it, making ideologies visible, concrete.81 He longed for an ‘allegorical theatre’ where ‘ideas reincarnated would at long last ignite emotion. By dint of beauty’.82 Chéreau summed up his reading of the play in the programme, again polished through several hand-written and typed versions:83 two powerful political forces who lived in a beautiful country were engaged in a devious fight. Some of those French grandees had connections with England, others with Spain. When they married their children for the sake of political union, one party seized the opportunity of the feast to exterminate the other, at the instigation of the Italian queen mother, a reputed poisoner who kept lovers in both camps. Her three sons died but the war continued between the two clans. They located their fight in the realm of ideas, unaware that ‘at the conclusion of the tale, the Catholic leader wanted

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the pope murdered, and the Protestant made it known he would be happy to reign over a Catholic country.’ That is how Marlowe tells the story, ‘and everyone knows he was a writer thirsting for scandal.’84 Marlowe’s Protestant audience were still traumatised by the Saint Bartholomew massacres, and the recent threat of the Spanish Armada. Seldom had any dramatist written so close to the event, merely four years after the assassination of Henri III , Navarre having yet to conquer his crown and convert to the Catholic mass in exchange for a kingdom. For the young director, the heart of the play – more precisely what caught his own interest – was, again, ‘the bloody transition from one era to the next, the rise to power through serial political assassinations, the demystifying of a so-called “religious” war which only served a will to reign, away from any metaphysics’.85 According to Danièle Thompson, who would write the screenplay of La Reine Margot some twenty years later, he was fascinated by the Saint Bartholomew event, the ideological murder in one of the bloodiest periods in French history.86 He was also attracted to a popular dramaturgy that gave it a touch of macabre comedy, as in a fairground where the people whom history persistently ignores throw rubber balls at eminent figures. The affinity with the popular crowds of Mnouchkine’s 1789, who gather in groups to hear the actors narrate the taking of the Bastille, was not quite a coincidence: after being invited to rehearse and perform 1789 in Milan by Grassi while Chéreau was working on Toller, Mnouchkine’s production was to be part of the first Villeurbanne season. Of two possible translators, Jean Paris and Jean Vauthier, Chéreau chose the poet, who had recently adapted The Revenger’s Tragedy into Le Sang for the director Marcel Maréchal. He did not want a rewriting in the style of Le Sang, but asked Vauthier to ‘place the quality of his idiom – its lyricism, harshness, febrility – at Marlowe’s service without destroying the concise quality of the play’.87 His own treatment raised complaints that instead of respecting Vauthier’s jewel of a text, he had drowned the words under so many sounds,

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of splashing water, music, alarums, that they were scarcely audible. One reviewer especially, Jean-Jacques Lerrant, after close comparison of both translations, thought Chéreau should have used the ‘elliptical, naïve, rugged text’ of Jean Paris which was closer to the original English and better suited to his design, where Vauthier’s superb language enriched the characters but was smothered and played down by the production. He feared Chéreau’s apparent inclination to do without a text altogether might lead him to throw all he had into things visible, as Robert Wilson did in Le Regard du sourd.88 He was partly right: Chéreau did think of his Massacre as an homage to Deafman Glance, but had no intention of doing away with the text. Nor to obey those who, again, requested important cuts, arguing that the text could be read aloud in one hour but the show lasted nearly four. On the contrary, the young director felt a close agreement with Marlowe, though he adhered to Marlowe’s world more than to the story he told.89 Again, Chéreau’s relations with his translator were not harmonious. ‘Who committed the massacre?’ the poet Jean-Noël Vuarnet angrily asked, complaining that Vauthier’s text had been disregarded both by director and reviewers. Dumur, the main target of this attack, retorted that to his knowledge, ‘Vauthier is far from agreeing with Chéreau’s production’, though Vauthier himself did not publicly voice his discontent as Leyris had.90 According to Alain Libolt, who played Charles IX , they quarrelled over passages Chéreau wanted tightened or cut, while Vauthier fought any alteration brought to his text. He appeared briefly in the early stages of rehearsals, and was soon politely ushered out, leaving Chéreau to cut as he wished. Arguments continued hotly around the table, especially with his former coach Emilfork, one of the two stage assassins, who was soon replaced by a more malleable Italian actor, Graziano Giusti. Only later, with Yves Bonnefoy, perhaps after the experience of working with living authors, would Chéreau find harmony and fertile interchange when they pored over Hamlet. There were other complaints, from those who were shocked by what they considered the expensive fantasy of a brilliant

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spoilt child, or megalomaniac tyrant.91 All agreed the show was spectacularly beautiful, and stressed Chéreau’s talent as a painter, his ‘imaginary museum of theatrical arts’.92 To the reviewer of France-Soir, it was ‘a miracle of beauty and mystery’: Marlowe’s melodrama was ‘drawn towards tragedy through the dreams of an aesthete fascinated by death’.93 Les Lettres françaises, Louis Aragon’s newspaper, declared it ‘Superbly useless’.94 Some found this succession of expensive tableaux inebriating but meaningless, or complained that the actors disappeared behind the virtuosity of Chéreau’s staging, but others hailed him as a theatrical genius. Others still recommended that he turn to the cinema. To Harold Hobson, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, he had drowned himself in a huge metaphor. In the communist daily, L’Humanité, and again later in the quarterly Travail théâtral, Léonardini denounced Chéreau’s political irresponsibility, decadent fascination with death, aestheticism, hedonism, selfprofit, and vacuity.95 More perceptively, Colette Godard thought it would take a psychoanalyst to uncover why this glorious young man, whose youth seemed impregnable, kept looking for new ways to narrate ‘the pains of loneliness, the anguish of aging, the despair of time past, the surrender to death’.96 Some of the attacks would be frequently repeated. The opening night had been attended by the ‘tout-théâtre international’ (theatrical jet-set) flown in from ‘Milan, Paris, London, Rome and everywhere’.97 There were fears that Villeurbanne would attract Parisian rather than provincial crowds, contrary to its advertised policy of decentralization. Poirot-Delpech accused Chéreau of having betrayed the glorious TNP ideals, making 1972 the year of Vilar’s final death: for all Chéreau might try to exonerate himself by advertising his scorn of the bourgeois State’s money, he enjoyed the luxury of denigrating his own privilege as an artist. Opulence was bad for him, the message of the production was thin and reactionary. Worse, he had reduced history to a ‘cloaque’.98 The word cloaque (sewer) would keep returning

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under the pen of reviewers. Only a few critics pointed out that he was attempting to break away from stifling, deadly habits of representing history: his audacities offended only those accustomed to the kind of ‘well-made play’ that avoids all ideas and only repeats familiar images. His anachronisms were deliberate ways of fusing lost periods of the past: ‘There is nothing gratuitous in this theatricality: it is language taken at face value.’99 From nearby Geneva, François Truan recalled the tradition of Vilar, whose repertory was predominantly Elizabethan, to stress that ‘Chéreau’s Massacre makes a radical break away from everything which, until now, French tradition offered us by way of grand historical shows.’100 The Herald Tribune observed that Marlowe himself had been out of tune with the polite society of the eighteenth century or the prude society of the nineteenth, but was back into his own now in our age of equivalent violence, marked by equally grotesque political assassinations.101 As for Chéreau, he denounced a critical terrorism, complaining that French journalists measured the theatre by literary standards: ‘French critique, which comes from literature, knows nothing apart from symbol, generalizing and moral imperative.’ He enjoined Poirot-Delpech to do his job instead of branding him both as Vilar’s murderer and spoilt brat of the bourgeois State. It was time to see that they stood at the opening of a new era, that Massacre was attempting to answer a problem: ‘how to deal with historical theatre, how to tell today an ancient story, how to avoid the double snare of actualization and sentimentalism and – why not? how to do a poet’s work’.102 Years later, he would still fume with anger and quote in support the historian Claude Roy’s opinion, ‘ “What if, after all, History really was a sewer?” Perhaps Claude Roy knew better than Poirot-Delpech.’103

A wall with a soul – Lear Last of these early Elizabethan encounters, several more steps removed from Shakespeare, Chéreau’s production of Lear

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premiered at Villeurbanne on 8 April 1975, transferred to the Odéon in October, then to Créteil and to Brussels. Edward Bond was little known in France at the time. Only three of his plays had been performed before, each raising a scandal: Early Morning at the Avignon festival, Narrow Road to the Deep North in Nice, and Saved in Paris. And now Lear: at the rise of the curtain, a body falls from the fly loft among a group of miners straight out of Zola, blackened with coal and mud. A workman is immediately judged guilty of sabotage by an old gentleman in top hat and coat, tied to the stake and shot. Discussing his Lear, written ten years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Bond argued that ‘Our modern society glorifies and uses violence constantly. All my plays speak of violence, because it is the crucial problem that will determine what will become of us.’104 It was hard work for the TNP public relations team to prepare audiences for such unfamiliar stuff, and warn the actors what kind of reception they might get: in suburban Créteil, instead of disputing among themselves, they made tiny adjustments to their parts, came to the edge of the stage and shouted at the public, engaging them in a direct confrontation. Because the violence in the play was so much stronger, it turned back and defused the violence in the auditorium.105 The production kept evolving, and always should, Chéreau felt, as a result of ‘the long battle one fights against an author to express more clearly what he wanted to say’. One does not fight it alone: ‘the actors have their own ideas, and the spectators, through the way they react, give us precious indications’.106 The critics too needed prepping. ‘Why stage Bond rather than Shakespeare?’ some asked, having seen Peter Brook’s ‘Beckettian’ King Lear.107 Chéreau had pre-empted the question: that would have been archaeological theatre, trying to clarify yesterday’s meanings, and pointing out how current they were.108 In his notes, he writes that ‘Lear tells us such beautiful things, about today’s world as well as about ourselves. It is so much more amusing, more exciting, and this I discover as we progress in rehearsals, than Shakespeare’s Lear.’109 He

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will confide to Bataillon that he found it ‘very beautiful and impressive, thanks to Shakespeare’,110 but in the programme, he asserts that Bond’s play is ‘more exciting today than Shakespeare’s King Lear, which one had better forget for the length of a performance, for fear of getting lost in vain comparisons’.111 This new Lear offers both the pleasure of narrating the old legend of the king divested of his realm by his daughters and a more direct way of speaking about our world, about ‘the revolutionary dream, its deviations, its failures, and the hope that is born from deepest despair.’ It is, in the director’s view, ‘not Sartrian, not Brechtian, not of the post-war years, not of the sixties: it is monstrously of today’.112 It emerged ‘from the very depths of the disarray of our recent years of history’.113 To Chéreau, the play was ‘pessimistic but not nihilistic’. The Hell depicted by Bond is the vicious circle of revolutions that reproduce the regimes they have overthrown, even if their aims differ. But it is futile to repeat that all regimes inevitably create policed states. Instead of feeding on vain hopes that things will get better by themselves, one needs to feed on despair: ‘despair is dynamic, it is a spur, it gives to action its meaning’.114 That revolutions may be perverted is no reason to give up the dream of a revolution. By the phrase ‘monstrously of today’, Chéreau also meant that Lear broke with all extant theatrical codes, and escaped all known genre categories. He was drawing nearer to contemporary authors, but it took him a long time to find his ideal. Though he had not met Bond he never felt so close to a living writer, he declared,115 and was resolved now to work only on modern plays: ‘we don’t need to reread the great classics. It is like coming out of an archaeological theatre to tell ourselves true stories.’116 Again, this production raised mixed feelings. The words ‘Grand-Guignol’, a Punch and Judy show, turned up in several reviews. Even among Chéreau’s early supporters, there was a fear, again, that he would decline into aestheticism or worse, nihilism, and give in to a morbid fascination for violence. The sympathetic Lucien Attoun felt that after his Massacre Chéreau

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further expressed the death of comfortable certainties, but with this Lear, he might reach a point of no return in his ideological progress.117 Worse than the overall cruelty and pessimism of the play, Dumur thought, was the nastiness in the treatment of each character, but maybe Chéreau was right in detecting a faithful mirror of Elizabethan violence in the Englishman’s picture of today. He and others listed the casualties: Luce Garcia-Ville, who committed suicide after creating the part of Fontanelle; Claude Lévêque (Lord Warrington), who broke his leg climbing the wall; and six spectators who fainted during the torture scenes. Chéreau was beginning to attract international notice. Plays and Players contemptuously acknowledged numerous ‘brilliant little coups of lateral directorial thinking’, in a production that ‘hovered uneasily between all the styles he asserted in his programme note the play did not have’, and pointed out how much water had flown under the political bridge since Lear’s premiere in 1971. But that was Channel water. On the French shore, they organize these things differently. After repeatedly advertising his powerlessness as a man of the theatre and his genius as a director, Chéreau had at last made his positive call for insurrection with his Italian Murieta, Gilles Sandier felt: getting rid of the theatre’s old clothes became intermeshed with the legitimacy, at some crucial times in history, of revolutionary violence.118 Now, though the reviewer praises the interpretation and general beauty of this Lear, he deplores a return to the ‘tragic humanism’ so typical of the French, which negates revolutions because they always end with a new dictatorship: ‘When Pnom Penh and Saigon make the headlines, what is the point of telling us all this?’ Even if he did not expect Chéreau to produce ‘positive heroes’, this stress on death and human loneliness, this absolute despair with all things political carried the risk of an ideological crisis.119 But the young philosopher André Glucksmann saw Chéreau as a clear-sighted reader of Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago revealing the crimes of the Soviet régime had recently been published in French. His review quoted Stendhal, ‘horrors are

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always the work of a petty mind which needs to reassure itself about its own merit’120 and listed ‘Hitler, Stalin, Franco, so small that they can easily fit inside us’. With rare insight, he also traces Chéreau’s future progress: ‘Lear has one eye in excess, like Greek divines, Shakespeare’s fools and Marivaux’s maid servants’.121 Chéreau, who always paid close attention to critical reviews, was indignant at the allusions to Phnom Penh, which had just fallen under the Khmer Rouge’s domination. His private notes through the summer of 1975, between the premiere in Villeurbanne and the transfer to the Odéon, show him pondering on the Left’s refusal to discuss the failure of their ideals: were the camps, the events in Russia and the Eastern bloc, the special twentieth-century brand of State violence, our monstrous history of the past fifty years a perversion of true Marxist thought, or Marxism itself? How dare those critics say one should not talk about it but concentrate instead on establishing socialism? If revolution inevitably took the path of torture, as Anne Ubersfeld wrote, was it not his duty to narrate this fatality and rebel against it, precisely what he and Bond were doing? To talk about the distress of life and the failure of the revolution amounts to calling for another revolution with all one’s strength: ‘I am absolutely sure I am not playing into any rightist hands, and I refuse to be told that we must not cause people to despair’ (cause Billancourt to despair, so the phrase went in 1950).122 It was high time reviewers stopped using terrorist arguments and references to events in Phnom Penh, Saigon or Portugal to delay ‘a tragic meditation on spurned revolutions’, instead of ‘listening to the poet, and following the perpetual rebirth of rebellions’, the progress of those people who ‘feed on despair as others feed on hope, who learn before your eyes the alternative lessons of dejection and revolt, power and error, who fight against loneliness’.123 Thus Bond’s Lear and his Ghost should be loved equally, if for different motives. Politics was not the matter of the play, ‘only its horizon’. Bond’s Hell was so atrocious it could make

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one feel that death was kinder than having to live through it, but Chéreau denied any taste for violence per se. He was ‘but mildly interested in the horror, the malignity of the play. The fiercest violence was the one exercised against oneself’, which Lear ‘connects with the laws of social morality established by those in power’.124 His aim was to unfold the everyday mechanisms of this violence, its terrible mixture of feelings, contradictions, beauty in the midst of distress, desperate humour, all that is human and gives flesh to the parable, striving to root it into the here and now.125 The Gravedigger’s Boy was given an increased role in Lear’s metamorphosis as he guides the old man’s steps towards self-knowledge. Lear’s last word in the play is compassion, a lesson he only understands at the end of his course. The rehearsal notes betray moments of self-doubt, on his workaholism, on the semi-failure of his film, La Chair de l’orchidée (The Flesh of the Orchid), perhaps caused by its excessive complexity, and the lessons to be drawn from this attempt: ‘it is high time I got rid of my irretrievable faults – insecurity at times? On second thoughts, no: audiences may be wrong, people “in the know” like it. It won’t move the crowds who find it complicated.’126 Performing Lear raised numerous basic problems: how to represent the desperate humour, inherited from Beckett, of those English clowns, where to find suitable actors, how to occupy the Gravedigger’s Boy during the autopsy.127 The mirror scene should be played as a progression in Lear’s role, be built on the discovery of things, of the bird at Act 3. The staging must be ‘obvious, dry, not spectacular, the notorious simplicity without the mannerism’. Before the transfer to the Odéon, various details – the attitude of each soldier, each minor role, the fall of the corpse on stage at the opening, Cordelia’s rise to leadership – want further attention. The end of Act 2 which tells three different stories – Lear, the Ghost, the revolutionaries’ takeover – plus a fourth one about Thomas John and Susan, needs reordering. The doctor must speak all his lines before he punctures Lear’s eye, to avoid raising laughs. The actors must

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stir up emotion, make ‘the love in the relationships madly desperately true.’ It would take Chéreau some time to base his strength less on scenography and skilled techniques than on the actors’ performance. His recent first attempt at filming had altered his method, he felt, making him realize it was easier to create splendid images than to confront actors, to love them and demand something from them.128 Now he wanted ‘everything done through the actors’ presence’. They would perform in full light instead of his favoured chiaroscuro, a sharper mode of lighting evocative of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson.129 He even pronounced the erstwhile banned word, telling them he expected ‘un jeu psychologique’, which involved working on their own psychology.130 François Simon, who played the title role after performing in Toller and in La Chair de l’orchidée, explains Chéreau’s unusual method: he gave directions that fed the character, no analysis, but a hyper sensibility that made the actor feel he created everything himself.131 Desarthe confirms that the preparation consisted of exchanging stories with no immediate connection with the play: ‘Chéreau only works over ambiguities. He calls up what makes people complex. With him one always comes to face dizzying chasms. You feel fragile, but you go where you had never been before.’132 Chéreau credits Desarthe for the development of his Gravedigger’s Boy: Bond’s ghost was more contemplative, and it was Desarthe, the major agent of transformation, who made the character more pugnacious.133 Parallel with Chéreau’s constancy in the choice of actors, his range of nuances and clothes remained. From evening dress to rags, in shades of grey and black, they matched the black humour of the play, and what would become known as ‘the Chéreau white’. Peduzzi’s set, a concrete wall ‘with a soul, full of holes and rough patches’, was designed to ‘generate anxiety’,134 surrounded by noises of building works, dredge, cement plant, gravel pit. To Glucksmann, Peduzzi’s wall is not a symbol: everyone then could go take a walk by night on île Seguin and find a similar one circling the Renault factory, the only

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kind of monument our twentieth century is able to build: ‘This Denmark is a prison; the whole Europe a factory’.135 It inevitably suggested the Berlin Wall, but the production was not straightforwardly topical: ‘the martyrs of our own time appear as superimpressed on the characters of history or dramatic tale’.136 On the journey from Shakespeare to now, ghosts of the Commune insurrection in 1871 hovered around the Wall. The cold executions, the aseptic tortures, the eye-gouging scene evoked the ‘scientific’ medicine practised by the Auschwitz surgeons. Lear’s court is his cradle, Bond explains, ‘and only when he becomes an old man is he suddenly born’. Chéreau did not understand nor share Bond’s pessimism. What interested him most was Bond’s modern vision and its leader, a ‘Baron Krupp in tuxedo, visiting his steelworks on his way back from the opera’.137 This Lear will ‘relearn how to live through anger, fury and errors, and all by himself he recreates the whole history of humanity’, a theme later developed in La Dispute.138 Minor alterations in the text, especially its punctuation, stressed this reading: François Simon ‘changed a question into a certainty, an observation into a grievance, a statement into a proclamation’.139 Desarthe, a smiling Gravedigger’s Boy, shone like a good deed in a naughty world. Chéreau upset Bond’s pessimism to stress ways of rediscovering the world with new acumen, a reconquered lucidity won by the experience of despair and rebellion.

3 Through Space and Time

After this Lear without a King, Chéreau stayed away from Shakespeare for over a decade, but did not keep his promise to concentrate on modern texts, with the sole exception of Loin d’Hagondange. He had been deeply moved by this ‘story like thousands of others, the story of two people who have no place in history, whom one seldom sees in the theatre’.1 The play, written in 1975 by a 27-year-old Jean-Paul Wenzel, was as contemporary as could be, set in Hagondange, a small mining town in north-eastern France, but its theme, the ageing pains of a retired couple of workers, was perhaps too domestic and quotidian for Chéreau. The 1970s saw him have a major impact in theatre and opera with Marivaux (La Dispute, 1973), Offenbach (Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 1974), Wagner (The Ring, 1976–1980), Berg (Lulu, 1979) and Ibsen (Peer Gynt, 1981). He was attracted to works through which he could tell in two hours not just the whole story of a human life, but a whole history of humanity.

Babes in the wood In La Dispute, four children, two of each sex, are submitted to a laboratory experiment by a couple of aristocrats who have kept them from birth isolated in a forest, raised by black servants, and who allow them to meet when they reach

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adolescence, to watch the results. Their scientific object, in Marivaux’s play, is to establish who of the human species was first a betrayer in love, man or woman. To find the answer, the Prince argues, ‘one would have needed to see the beginnings of the world and of society’. Now, thanks to the experiment, they will. After moments of Rousseauesque bliss, the two young couples go through the gamut of attraction, jealousy, lies, tricks, quarrels and murdering impulses. Man and woman prove equal in treachery, till at the very end a third pair of children are pulled out of the orchestra pit by the Prince: those resist all attempts at seduction and remain faithful to each other, thus making nonsense of the cruel experiment, but it is too late – the lost children have fled to the forest. There can be no return to an innocent nature, only a corruption of its state of innocence by a perverse experiment. ‘Believe me, says the Princess, we have no reason to joke. Let us go.’ La Dispute opened with Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, played to an empty stage for seven minutes, during which incandescent smoke rose from the orchestra pit. This was followed by a prologue, devised to flesh out the part of Princess Hermiane, which was to be played by the renowned Valentina Cortese. But Cortese could not free herself from a film commitment; it was the Brazilian singer Norma Bengell who played Hermiane, with Roland Bertin interpreting the Prince. Chéreau’s well-read dramaturg, the philosopher François Regnault, composed this prologue out of fragments from a large variety of Marivaux’s texts discussing current philosophical and scientific issues, the nature of man, education, the origin of sentiments.2 One of them, a playlet entitled Le Saut du fossé, jumping over a ditch to reach Fortune, happily coincided with the production’s design. The stage was divided between the natural world of the children and the cultural world of the court. At the end of the prologue, the court went by footbridge over the pit to the main stage, to watch a playback on the origins of humanity. The derelict state of the Gaîté Lyrique, where La Dispute was first performed, added a layer to Chéreau’s indictment of

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a decaying society. Black servants dressed in the style of 1920s African Americans entered to the tunes of Louis Armstrong’s ‘New Orleans Function’, while the court, equipped with lenses and telescopes evocative of the Enlightenment’s taste for optical science, watched the children crawl and gurgle like babies ignorant of society’s norms, then learn all its tricks in a few days. The Prince behaved to Hermiane not as a lover but as a bullying master, holding her under the ray of a strongly lit mirror: he probably had the children executed at the end, Chéreau thought. The experiment unfolded itself in the clearing of a leafy jungle, real trees planted around tall pillars inspired by Hans Bellmer’s obsessive drawing of walls, or those vestiges ‘which date from Ancient Rome, have weathered time, and remind us both of eternity and mortality’.3 Here, as in all Chéreau’s productions, the monumental architecture was tempered by misty clouds, veils and light props. The forest lived through a text suffused with woody fragrances, and through an elaborate soundtrack of birds, crickets, frogs, ravens, wolves and gusts of wind, created by André Serré, Chéreau’s sound engineer since Sartrouville.4 Rehearsals started after twenty days of intensive work at the table, during which the actors read, heard stories, and discussed the text. The aim was to bring to light the very bones of the fable: ‘The problem is not to respect an author, but to give consistency to what his play offers.’5 Chéreau dispensed with the traditional elegant ‘marivaudage’, thus raising the hackles of specialists like Frédéric Deloffre.6 On the contrary, he played up the animality of the youngsters as they fall in love and discover rivalry, self-doubt, envy, rebellion, as do Shakespeare’s lovers in the woods of Athens under the eye of an indifferent Puck. In a matter of hours representing seven days and nights, as in the creation of the world, they recreate successive stages of civilization from a state of nature through the beginnings of humanity to the violent antagonisms of contemporary society. ‘What a quantity of new worlds!’7 a Miranda-like Églé exclaims at her first entrance, watched by the court, when the bandage blindfolding her is removed.

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To Chéreau and Peduzzi, Marivaux is the only French classical playwright who wanders into the forest. Arguments have been advanced for and against possible echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Prince’s experiment. There is no evidence that Marivaux knew Shakespeare’s plays, but some of his plots show intriguing similarities. La Dispute is the only one that was created after the publication of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, the hole through which Shakespeare entered France.8 Marivaux may also have had a glancing knowledge of the English poet’s works through his friend Pierre-Antoine de La Place, who first published translations and summaries of Shakespeare’s plays, including the Dream, in 1745, shortly after the creation of La Dispute on 19 October 1744. The play caused great unease at the time: it was suppressed after only one performance, and quite forgotten in France until its revival after more than two centuries, though it enjoyed success in the German Sturm und Drang. Marivaux’s text is a study in the voyeurism and cruelty of his time, Chéreau insisted. The director’s aim was to seize not only the author but his century, treat La Dispute as ‘an allegory endowed with the strength and violence of Sade’s novels, of Hoffmann’s Tales’, against a background of virulent social criticism.9 He was already working on those Tales that he would reinvent at the Opéra the following year.10 Claude Stratz, who attended the rehearsals, recalls that ‘there, I see someone whose only fulcrum is the text. Chéreau does not come with preconceived ideas, he likes this work and he questions it. Each sentence leads to a number of “whys” that whip the imagination, to a host of ideas.’ In sketching answers to these questions, he develops the characters, ‘imagines stage acts, narrates the novel within the play’.11 The critics were, again, fiercely divided, some hailing Chéreau as the conscience of our time, others revolted by his display of cold scientists, perverse mirrors, writhing bodies and passionate spasms.12 No one on the French stage before, and very few since, managed to make so incandescent the violence and eroticism that would become his trademark. The

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Marivaux specialist Deloffre sparred in public with François Regnault, declaring that the actresses’ naked breasts belonged in a provincial cabaret for lesbians. If a few of his ilk were scandalized at the treatment of a revered author, others felt they were seeing the true Marivaux stripped of the customary witticisms subsumed under ‘marivaudage’, the writer who had dared question a number of eighteenth-century myths on the nature of man and the ‘good savage’.13 Dort himself pointed out deviations from the original meaning of the text, in words that Chéreau would long resent like a betrayal: ‘here it is the combined perverseness of nature and society we aim to represent; with Marivaux, it was the living conditions in society. La Dispute was a social education; it becomes a nightmare in which they all sink’.14 To Dort, Chéreau had missed a crucial dimension of Marivaux’s diagnosis: if he was right in denouncing the fallacy of the Enlightenment’s optimism, he did it in the name of a moralistic puritanism that reeked of the nineteenth century. The play’s mutual control of theatre and reality was cancelled in this fascinating moonlit landscape of death and universal decline. In the 1976 revival, the issues discussed by the voyeurist couple were developed, the animality of the first cast gave more room to tenderness and the nostalgia of childhood. Or perhaps audiences were more inured to Chéreau’s ways. Alain Libolt, for instance, who played in every revival of La Dispute, is positive that, contrary to what some of the reviews claimed, its earlier ‘animality’ had in no way been toned down; the production did not alter from one season to the next, apart from the changes in the casting. The original lighting had raised complaints that the characters were kept in darkness. They were now lit with greater clarity, though still performing throughout under the moonlight: Look at those children, see the crimes they commit, see how they lie to themselves, how they want to learn and cannot, how they wish to make every experiment and wear them all out so quickly, yet what hopes they still carry within

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themselves when the moon is at the full. I leave you with them, they are like us, they wish to be loved.15 La Dispute, defined by Odette Aslan as ‘un spectacle matrice’ (a matrix production), marked the opening of a new era in the theatre for the public at large, and for many young artists whose passion for Chéreau’s work began there, like Isabelle Adjani, Jacques Bonnaffé, Ivo van Hove, Arnaud Despléchin, writers Hervé Guibert and Bernard-Marie Koltès, and academics and theatre specialists Monique Le Roux, Patrick Scemama, Georges Banu, and Jean-Michel Déprats. The very young Adjani saw the expression of a femininity still hidden from her, ‘all my idealisations were there, between Shakespeare and Marivaux’.16 For David Lan, director of the Young Vic, although the production received a poor welcome when it came to London, ‘it changed everything’.17 As for Chéreau, thanks to Marivaux the liberty of the forest appeared just this once in the French theatrical repertoire, whereas Shakespeare offered it all the time. ‘La Dispute revealed me to myself’, he reminisced while working on As You Like It, in his last radio interview, its smell of the woods, the fog where spectators could get lost, the ghostly orchestra, and a little girl in the audience who asked the scenographer, ‘Over there, is it outside?’18

Ringing the changes Chéreau had never attended a performance of Wagner’s Ring before 1975.19 He had only directed two operas so far, always in answer to commands, as the conditions of the lyrical stage dictate, the only liberty of a director being to turn down offers. If he were asked to direct Verdi’s Otello, for instance, he would decline: ‘I don’t know any opera adapted from one of Shakespeare’s plays that can stand the comparison.’20 He needed operas with strong libretti – Wagner, Berg, Janácˇek – and would exercise his director’s right by turning down

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numerous offers after his Bayreuth experience. The epic tale of this centennial Ring has often been told. The ‘enfant terrible of the French theatre’, then aged 31, was not the first director recommended by Pierre Boulez, the champion of the avantgarde, to Wolfgang Wagner: Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman turned down the offer, Peter Stein took it but wanted to ‘denazify’ and make cuts in the Ring, two unacceptable demands. It was Boulez’s sister, a regular attendee at the TNP, who suggested Chéreau.21 Staging four operas with only four months’ preparation was a terrifying prospect, and Chéreau seemed so behind that Wolfgang nearly gave up on him, but Boulez stood firm. Both director and conductor agreed that faithfulness had nothing to do with literality, thus raising fierce controversies.22 Both wanted to get rid of the Bayreuth tradition, which they defined as mannerisms transmitted and transformed into worse mannerisms. They were right, Sylvie de Nussac points out; it was Cosima, in her determination to see her late husband’s work performed in majesty, who confused magnitude with noise and pomp, and made the Walkyrie’s ride the sound norm for the whole opus. Wagner wanted most of the pieces played piano, and kept reminding his musicians that even piano was sometimes too loud. The early testimony of the music scholar Albert Lavignac is eloquent: ‘In Bayreuth, the orchestra, though numerous, is never loud. If one wanted to be critical, the only reservation would be that it is sometimes too discreet; it never covers the voice of the singer, each syllable reaches the audience distinctly.’23 Boulez complained that the orchestra confused expressivity and noise, strangely neglecting Wagner’s repeated instructions to play ‘più piano’.24 In his search for clarity, he was so refining the sound of the orchestra that the musicians threatened to go on strike if they were not allowed to play as loudly as usual. As for Chéreau, he demanded that the singers become actors, play everything in the text, use their body as well as their voice: his Brünnhilde, played by a firmly supportive Gwyneth Jones, was to enter running in, a happy teenager filled with the excitement

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of first love. ‘I approach the “Ring” via psychology, the only approach that suits me’, he told Nussac before the general rehearsal. He was but following Wagner’s wishes, who declared a preference for actors able to sing over singers able to act.25 Again, Lavignac confirms: ‘The Wagnerian performer needs to exhibit the true qualities of a tragedian; because there is as much stuff to play and mime as to sing, and the least flaw, the least awkwardness on stage becomes tantamount to a wrong note: a discordance.’26 The discordance that infuriated the public of 1976 was elsewhere. There was hardly a trace of the legendary Rhine in the hydraulic dam guarded on stage by prostitutes.27 With his set designer Peduzzi, Chéreau made such fun of artistic institutions and architecture that Winifred Wagner wanted to shoot him, her daughter confessed. Yet their innovations were not idly provocative but drawn from points made in the text, where Wotan is accused of having corrupted nature, and the Rhinemaidens of alluring men. Always attentive to critical reactions, at the end of the first season, Chéreau spent a week reading all the reviews to assess where he had – and had not – reached his aim, as if working on rough papers, to be restyled in the next seasons. The musicians who did not like Boulez’s style were told by Wolfgang they could leave, and 40 per cent of the orchestra were replaced. The Walhalla and rock were redesigned, but Chéreau stuck to his dam, vowing to make his conservative audience ‘swallow the iconoclasm to the hilt’. Both director and conductor gradually reworked their approach, while performers and audiences came to a clearer understanding of their interpretation. What began amid a storm of furious protests ended five years later with eighty-five minutes of standing ovation, and over a hundred curtain calls, at the last performance. Television director Brian Large, who supervised the videotaped version, recalls that he was ‘bowled over’ when he first saw it: ‘to me it was perhaps the most human, certainly the funniest, wittiest, and also the cruellest Ring I’ve ever seen.’28 According to the music critic Eleonore Büning, the French team revolutionized the understanding of

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Wagner in Germany.29 They would have many less talented imitators, so much so that Gwyneth Jones recently denounced them, declaring herself ‘sick’ of the way many of today’s producers disgraced precious works of art with ‘blue jeans, ugliness and the desecration of sex’: ‘It would seem that their main aim is to create something which is going to arouse protests and scandal and has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the score, which makes them “the talk of the town” and enhances their careers.’30 When questioned by Nussac about Chéreau’s methods for Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, she like most of her fellow singers had simply answered, ‘We love him, and we try to give him all he wants.’ All declared themselves ready to do anything for the privilege of performing again with him, even accept small parts, and some of them did.31 They had never been asked before to express such deep, disturbing emotions, not just move their arms and pour out notes. Chéreau thought that Wagner wanted to give his point of view on the politics of his own time, that he was tempted at first with ideas of a political revolution and ended with only a revolution in art, and that this contradiction must appear on stage.32 Regnault brought to the director’s attention the French admirers of Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Claudel, who showed a brilliant openness of mind, compared with the more traditionalist German Wagnerites. Boulez contributed with Adorno, whose ‘rescue’ of Wagner’s music from mounting fascism includes a virulent criticism of the bourgeois rebel’s contradictions: Wotan ‘is the phantasmagoria of the buried revolution’, and Wagner’s pessimism that of the rebel who has betrayed the rebellion. The major risk is that his operas may become commodities, providing ‘the illusion of the absolute reality of the unreal.’33 Various reviewers thought they recognized the views of George Bernard Shaw. Although he complained that they misunderstood his purpose and exaggerated this influence, Chéreau might well have taken cues from the Perfect Wagnerite, down to its imaginary re-dressing of post-Marxist characters, but to him modern dress was one

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of many means to convey meaning, not an end in itself: he juxtaposed tuxedos and mailcoats as a medieval painter would have done, to convey an allegory.34 At its inception, Wagner defined his Ring as a mythical poem that ‘includes in nuce the beginning and the end of the world’.35 One of his favourite sources was Jacob Grimm’s rich Teutonic Mythology, which Regnault completed with Dumézil’s study of the German gods.36 The story narrated in Chéreau’s Ring extended from the time of its writing, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, to the 1920s, thus exposing what Shaw considered the core of Wagner’s cycle – plutocracy, the corruption of mankind by the power of money: ‘The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to face with destruction’.37 In Shaw’s reading of the Ring paraphernalia, Alberich’s gold mine need not be a mine; ‘it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders’, or any place where life and welfare are daily sacrificed to some greedy foolish creature. The fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 marked the end of melodramatic socialism, with its romantic amateurs and dreamers, while Wagner celebrated the German victory with a triumphant Kaisersmarsch: ‘though Alberic in 1850 may have been merely the vulgar Manchester factory-owner portrayed by Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of Essen or Carnegie of Homestead.’ The magic helmet ‘is a very common article in our streets’, usually in the form of a tall hat which ‘makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes him into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and father, a shrewd, practical independent Englishman, and what not, when he is really a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth’. Meanwhile the greatest of gods must choose between evils and agrees to shameful bargains to preserve his power. Man begins to stand up to Superman. When accused of injecting his own socialism into the Ring, Shaw retorted with the facts of

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Wagner’s life, ‘the pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator – on social evolution, religion, life, art and the influence of riches’ that he poured forth during his years of exile.38 This political agenda, allied with Wagner’s dream of an artistic synthesis integrating every aspect of a work and its performance, his ‘ingrained theatrical professionalism’, must have appealed to Chéreau, even if he agreed with Shaw that his effects ‘now seem old-fashioned and stagey’.39 Reporting the genesis of his Ring variations, Chéreau pays tribute to another more practical guide, Hans Mayer, who provided the main trend of his production with a few words on three major props: the ring, Wotan’s lance, and the sword, the first two connected with perjured pacts, and the third, Notung, which instead of the promised freedom begets nothing but violence.40 When he began work on Siegfried, his first concern was with the treatment of Mime, ‘i.e Wagner’s representation of the Jews’. He took the risk to play up ‘this hidden meaning’, but failed to uproot ingrained prejudices and rehabilitate the character at the expense of Siegfried: the German reviewers never used the word ‘Jew’ in their comments, while many a spectator congratulated him for his marvellously ‘ignoble and repulsive’ Mime.41 Professor Uwe Faerber, in a long essay reviewing all the points where Chéreau strayed from Wagner’s intentions and directions, never discusses the Jewish issue, nor sees any point to Mime’s shabby overcoat and suitcase, but particularly resents the stress placed on the tyranny of Wotan, instead of Alberich’s malignity.42 Indeed, Chéreau found Wotan’s duplicity abject, a politician who begs sympathy by expressing his soul’s torment over the dirty work he is doing, but does it regardless. Lear was also on his mind: ‘Just as Shakespeare’s King Lear had inspired Wagner’s design for Wotan (and Cordelia of course for Brünnhilde), Edward Bond’s Lear which I had staged not long before, and enjoyed working on, got mixed with Wotan and probably with the whole of the Ring.’43 These ‘figures of a monstrous, possessive, destructive father’44 would re-emerge through the fathers’ crushing authority in Hamlet. Opposite

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his Wotan, Brünnhilde stood like a Cordelia facing Lear, with a similar mixture of defiance and tenderness. Earlier productions came to haunt the set: ‘In 1975, the children of La Dispute who could have had Bond’s Lear for their father were making me a naïve gift of Die Walküre and it wasn’t all that wrong.’45 Lear’s iron door served again in the Bayreuth Walhalla and stayed there. ‘Wotan would address his soliloquy to himself; in other words, to a mirror like Lear, or Richard II , staring at himself, observing the marks that life stamped on his face.’46 The conductor Daniel Barenboim would later testify that in Chéreau’s direction of opera, text weighed as much as music. Having performed in many Chéreau productions, Alain Libolt experienced an uncanny feeling of recognition when he saw the first instalment of the Ring: it seemed as if all the work they had done before were part of this creation. As in a crucible, the incredible movements of the singers, their physical engagement, the positions on Peduzzi’s set, Gwyneth Jones on her knees, the staging, all Chéreau had invented and experimented with them had matured into a new masterpiece. Chéreau himself felt his operas duplicated his theatre productions: ‘For instance, with Peduzzi, we thought at one point of the Bayreuth tetralogy as the sum of all our shows and discoveries.’ Their first idea was to put on stage a ‘real forest’, then a ‘fake nature where machinists will hide behind the trees, and the forest will walk, like Dunsinane in Macbeth.’47 This project was soon abandoned, but La Dispute, which was revived during rehearsals of the Ring, haunted the wings. Siegmund and Siegelinde wore the clothes of Marivaux’s wild children.48 Wotan, played by Donald McIntyre, sang his long confession in Die Walküre with his back to the audience, facing Richard II ’s mirror, which he could orientate to watch Boulez conduct. For a man like Chéreau who so dreads to repeat himself, such connections, significant as they were, probably explain why he could never be wholly satisfied with directing operas: ‘I had the impression that opera could not feed me and that I was just rewarming my old shows to the heat of the music, recycling them.’49 Yet such

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quotations went farther than the recycling of used material. An appendix to Histoire d’un ‘Ring’ reveals their deeper meaning in Chéreau’s career, on the tragedy of political power that each age writes, and on King Lear, which Wagner knew so well: ‘While we wait for the work of art that the modern ear has in store for us on this issue, let us weave the thread that leads from Shakespeare to Wagner and to ourselves, safe in the knowledge that anyway, whatever we do and whoever directs, only one mythology will ever appear on stage, ours, the mythology of our time.’50 The angry reactions to the Ring reminded Libolt of the attacks they had suffered after Massacre, but Chéreau never let himself be impressed or intimidated by the critics. If he read theatre reviews with great attention, he made few concessions to fashion or popular demand. ‘They don’t like it? Let’s give them more of the same. They must come to us, not the reverse’, would be his usual reaction to hostile comments. And he did feel a possibility to ‘sum up my earlier productions in the Ring, drive it through the filters and distorting prisms of our prior works, lean on what might relate Wagner to the authors I had already practised.’51 As he had done with the background of Richard II and Massacre, he strove to bring out a filiation through the age of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, Lenz, and Hoffmann that had nurtured Wagner.52 He saw analogies with Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse, where society recreates everything from nothing through its mastery of nature. The costumes, scenery, the very acting were to present a sum of the theatrical aesthetics of the 1970s. Peduzzi dreamt of a ‘fabulous mix that might exist between architecture, industry, nature and painting’.53 The key decision was in the allegorical treatment of the Ring, which Wagner himself labelled szenisches Gleichnis (parables). Their aim was to act as visionaries, not borrow from intellectuals, Chéreau claimed in the programme of Siegfried. He had already defined his theatre as an ‘art of allegory’, making ideologies visible.54 In its sixteenth-century expression, allegory operates contrary to symbol, which aims to reach the universal through the singular; it precipitates

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meaning in a character, an object, an image. His ‘Notes sur le Ring’ further insist that the theatre is the privileged place ‘where ideologies, dialectics, are offered to sight and can be shown’.55 Instead of looking for unity, he played up the contradictions and ambiguities of the Ring, its unresolved ending, and his own earlier fascination with failed revolutions: ‘It seems to me Wagner began with the temptation of a political revolution that ended as no more than a revolution in art – a typical figure of the artist. He discovers at one point the power and the powerlessness of his art – and discovers the power that may inhabit him when he is aware of his powerlessness to change anything else by his art than art itself.’56

Peer’s onion skins Peer Gynt wanders around the world in search of himself before he returns an aged man to his native village. Chéreau’s return from Bayreuth was welcomed by the press like the homecoming of the prodigal son. Home, that is, to the theatre, back after five years of absence, apart from his brief excursion into the dingy setting of Loin d’Hagondange. Wenzel’s story about old people who had no story to speak of may have been an antidote to the pomp of Bayreuth, but after the Ring, the director wanted to practise theatre on a grand scale: ‘I have never done small things. I am only interested in spectacles that reach beyond themselves.’57 He first thought of Faust, an ‘impossible venture’ that would be Strehler’s long obsession, then decided on Ibsen’s Faustian dramatic poem. It was a double challenge, moved by the will to emulate Stein’s Peer Gynt ten years earlier, and to offer a sum total of what the stage could do. The challenge was also one for Gérard Desarthe, who performed alone the part of Peer from age 17 to 70. Max von Sydow had played it all by himself for Ingmar Bergman, but in a much shorter version.58 Stein had cast five different actors to interpret the role, not to spare them, but to avoid attracting sympathy for the anti-hero, whereas Chéreau and

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Desarthe aimed to forge a unified Peer at odds with the realities of his human and social condition. Alex Jennings, in John Barton’s ‘exhilarating’ production a decade later, would take the opposite road and play up Peer’s ‘terrific chameleon powers’.59 Chéreau’s seven-hour initiatory quest explored the layers of Peer’s identity, tapping all the theatrical procedures available, with twenty-three players who rehearsed for four months, five musicians, and a team of twenty stagehands, plus six in the cabins to manage the sounds and lights. The production opened at Villeurbanne in May 1981, where four video cameras under the direction of Bernard Sobel recorded eight performances, and transferred the following September to the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Because the Théâtre had other commitments, the set had to be put up or taken down in half an hour every day. The traditional machinery and painted cloths based on nineteenth-century models were put to such unprecedented use that the Villeurbanne machinos had to come and train their Parisian colleagues in working the changes. On stage, Peer journeyed through the history of theatrical forms: for each trip, a new scenery was pulled out of its casement as from a props room, with visible ropes and pulleys. This innovative project induced the CNRS , France’s highest research establishment, to start a workshop, each researcher concentrating on one aspect, text and variants, space, lighting, sound, costumes, props, machinery, acting, to attend rehearsals and performances, study recordings, interview participants, and publish the joint results of their enquiries in a detailed survey of the production.60 The play had never been staged uncut before. It was performed complete on two successive evenings, in a new translation by Regnault, Chéreau’s literary adviser since La Dispute. This involved over a year of intensive work, during which the translator consulted the two extant French versions, plus an English and a German one. Recalling the hours of discussion over variants, he confirms, as Bonnefoy would of Hamlet, Chéreau’s absolute concern to follow the author’s

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mind without bending it to obtain an attractive stage effect. When translating, Regnault insisted, one does not adapt to ‘what would please us, not to our demand of the day, to us, but to what this play tells us today’.61 To Catherine Naugrette, reviewing the stage history of Peer Gynt, Chéreau’s production ‘triggered a new shock and created an aesthetic gap, thus paving the way for a new era of Ibsenian theater and its reception’.62 Just as he had freed Wagner’s Ring from its parochial corset, Chéreau stripped Ibsen of Grieg’s romantic veilings by ordering a new score from Fiorenzo Carpi. In his ear, overfamiliar tunes like Solveig’s song recalled too many performances in bourgeois sitting-rooms or at school functions. On a par with Chéreau’s ability to convey a story through an image, there is a complete dramaturgy in the soundtrack of his productions: ‘Music is no mere spice or illustration, but an active agent that converts form into force – it is an organic appropriator of signs, a detector of lies, a disemboweller of illusions.’63 Peter Stein had dismissed Grieg as well, and used a variety of grotesque tunes to produce a Peer closer to Père Ubu than to Faust. Chéreau’s Peer went on an existential quest, and a metatheatrical reflection on his own practice, in a space designed to foster dreams. Where Stein used a bifrontal set, Peduzzi opened up the ‘cage de scène’, as he calls the acting space. The phrase, which Chéreau liked to use, took its inspiration from Faulkner’s Light in August: Joe Christmas ‘did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage’: cage de scène was that other cage to escape to, and Faulkner’s eagle would later fly over Dostoevsky’s prison in De la maison des morts. The complex variety of landscapes was fitted into an Italian-style frame, as in a shop from which stagehands pulled out each successive scene in open view, exposing the theatrical machinery. Here, Peduzzi wanted the space to be literally a trap, an infernal machine from which Peer runs away, and is repeatedly tossed back.64 Desarthe remembers an experience both exhausting and exhilarating, with a richly inventive Chéreau. He carried the

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main load of the performance, covering a wide range of acting styles, from intimate psychology to epic. The Trolls were Peer’s interior demons; his dreams of power brought him close to schizophrenia. He put on weight with maturity, then lost it again as he aged into a desiccated old man. His relationship with his mother, played by Maria Casarès, drew on Wilhelm Reich’s notion that he replaces both Åse’s lost husband and elder son.65 Their first entrance was a violent, halting, playful, sensual tussle anticipating Desarthe’s love–hate treatment of Gertrude and Ophelia. Catherine Rétoré made a chaste, luminous Solveig, rejected as soon as embraced, who bore their love alone, with her voice intact, to the end. Around them were some of Chéreau’s familiars, Roland Amstutz, Nada Strancar, Dominique Blanc, Didier Sandre, in a relatively small cast who performed several groups of myriad characters. The Trolls, for one, needed intensive work, growing increasingly repulsive to reflect society’s xenophobic nightmares and lurid appetites, while the expensive latex protheses designed for them were discarded in favour of elaborate makeup. Each played up to half a dozen parts, each belonging in a large fresco, as mirror reflections of Peer. Chéreau saw Peer’s travels as an endless struggle against ‘the angel, the dragon, the monster within himself’, against the fear that inhabits all of us.66 Regnault had supplied the company with books both to inform and feed their imagination. The published collection of texts he and Nussac gathered explore the ‘five worlds’ visited by Peer, his ages being five acts: folkloric, fantastic, female, real, metaphysical. Ibsen, who wrote the play while in Italy, informs his sister after their mother’s death he is now planning a trip to Egypt via Stockholm, Dresden and Paris, and describes his own inner self as a battlefield in which he is sometimes victorious, sometimes defeated.67 The collected texts recall his wanderings, and bear testimony, again, to the infinite variety offered to the performers: from Jeremiah’s Apocalypse to Kant, from Kubla Khan to Chateaubriand’s Itinerary to Paris and Jerusalem, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Nerval’s Cairo women, from Edgar

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Allan Poe to Lugné-Poe. Plus some of the many authors who commented upon or drew inspiration from Peer Gynt: Joyce, Shaw, Wilhelm Reich, Groddeck, Hofmannsthal, Claudel, and Rilke. And illustrations from Goya, Blake, Van Gogh, Turner, Munch, Norwegian landscapes and costumes, African deserts, the Sphinx . . . Included in the collection was a sentence that will haunt both Chéreau and Peduzzi, accentuated in French by its chiming echoes: ‘Et pourquoi les couleurs ne pourraientelles pas être les sœurs des douleurs, puisque les unes comme les autres nous attirent dans l’éternel?’68 (And why could not colours be the sisters of sorrows, since both draw us into eternity?) Regnault’s essay on the peelings of the self begins with Hamlet’s question, ‘To be or not to be’, which fits metaphysics in the space and time of a performance, and with Dover Wilson’s ‘simple but fundamental questions’, which open windows into the actual contents of the text, ‘from the strictest deduction to the most roaming reverie’: is Hamlet certain this is the ghost of his father? Why a silent pantomime showing the usurper’s crime before its spoken performance? Why does it elicit no reaction from the king? ‘This is how one must proceed.’69 And so they did, eight years later, adding a further episode to this ‘odyssey of the self’.70 Peer feels less angst about his subjectivity than Hamlet; the problem for him lies more in his relation to the world and to others. His determination to be himself ‘does not reside in a troubled, fearful subjectivity but in something far more active, more Elizabethan than Sartrian’, Regnault stresses.71 Ibsen’s own memories of Hamlet hardly need to be rehearsed here. To the question, ‘What is the Gyntish self?’ Peer answers that it is ‘The world behind my forehead’s arch’, ‘the host of wishes, appetites, desires’, ‘the sea / of fancies, exigencies, claims, / all that, in short, makes my breast heave, / and whereby I, as I, exist.’ Can he reach the kernel of the onion he peels on his return home? ‘To the innermost centre, / it’s nothing but swathings – each smaller and smaller.’ Then he hears Solveig sing, and runs away. At the end, it is she who saves him from being melted with other spoilt goods in the

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Button Moulder’s ladle by her testimony: ‘Thou hast made all my life as a beautiful song.’72 Chéreau’s long goodbye to the conventional stage begins with this new vertigo created by Peer Gynt.73 What he said about the existential quest of the hero of the play could apply to his own work in general: I chose a text related to us, to the questions we can ask ourselves: how to be oneself, how to fight everyday against oneself and one’s own cowardice, how to carry the weight of the Last Judgment on one’s shoulders every day. We came out of the last rehearsals transformed, and I pondered over what I had staged before. Had I been myself or the toy of events?’74 Peer Gynt urged audiences to cast a fresh look at the world and themselves after the experience: the programme note invited them to ‘Listen to Ibsen, watch this play and may your eyes and ears agree with your imagination.’

Settling down Throughout those years as guest-director of the Villeurbanne TNP, Chéreau maintained an uneasy tension between his past and present work, performing classics and looking for an author, perpetually unsatisfied, bent on never repeating himself yet constantly improving, developing and quoting earlier productions. Just as Massacre à Paris led to La Reine Margot, Peer Gynt would develop into Hamlet, and Hamlet into Elektra. The momentous encounter with BernardMarie Koltès, his long-hoped for playwright, gave him a fresh impulse to tackle today’s reality and bring unknown plays to the knowledge of the public. In 1981, Chéreau took on the management of the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, the suburban town on the west of Paris where the 1968 students’ movement began on 22 March, led by Daniel Cohn Bendit. If

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you read Nanterre’s entry on Wikipedia, you will find among the ‘important events’ of the 1960s the fact that its railway station, Nanterre-La Folie, was renamed Nanterre-Université, but no mention of the students’ uprising. The theatre, built in 1976 under the management of Pierre Debauche, had the status of a centre dramatique national, a national public theatre. Long before Chéreau had any thought of going there, it was inaugurated splendidly with four notorious productions, like so many arrows pointing him to the place: his own La Dispute, Planchon’s Tartuffe, Stein’s production of Gorki’s Summerfolk, Grüber’s of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles. It was Jean-Pierre Angrémy, then in charge of the Drama department at the Ministry of Culture, and a passionate admirer of Chéreau’s work, who first suggested him for Les Amandiers when Debauche resigned, but the offer was only officially signed under the ministry of Jack Lang when the Left came in power. Chéreau was named co-director with Catherine Tasca, assisted by Philippe Coutant as administrator and Alain Crombecque as artistic advisor.75 For a full year, they worked as a team with Claude Stratz and Pierre Romans to develop their ambitious project. To avoid political interference, it was to be an SARL , a limited liability company, not an association like other Maisons de la Culture. Tasca negotiated adequate financial support with the ministry. Her first mission was to settle Chéreau’s old Sartrouville debt with the help of private fund-givers, and restore him to full entrepreneur capacity. She did obtain a large grant for Les Amandiers, though not excessively so. To the end of his career, she points out, Chéreau never had nor sought financial security, and unlike many who had the management of a public theatre, never ensured golden parachutes for himself when he left. Each departure was to a new life. The old utopia of a theatrical phalanstery was reviving. Chéreau wanted the artistic, technical and administrative teams all closely involved in a common achievement. ‘Nanterre brought the answer to questions I had been unable to answer in Villeurbanne. I will be in my home and I will have a hand in

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everything. But the result was I didn’t move from Nanterre for eight years’.76 Those years, 1982 to 1990, saw the initial project carried out: two auditoriums, one traditional, one a transformable shed, a school for actors, a film studio, plus a bookshop and a restaurant that made it a place to live in and concentrate on work. The school was Romans’ idea, the general concept largely Chéreau’s, of a place divided between a visible acting space and an invisible one for research and experimentation:77 ‘This house would have one part emerged, public, and another, secret, underground, where people would work, keep accounts, write, experiment, produce, film, and this secret part would be as important as the other. And there would also be a school, a workshop rather, a permanent workshop.’78 Each season, musical events and film screenings would complete the dramatic programme. The initial project to include a cinema multiplex was pre-empted by the municipality who wanted to build one in the town centre. Months before the opening, the press buzzed with the excitement of this daringly innovative adventure. The press agent Corinne Bacharach had to keep journalists waiting with minimal material until Chéreau called a press conference and a photographic session for that very day, nearly causing a fit for some of his team. ‘Every detail counts’ was the lesson she soon learnt from him, details he all supervised personally, from the theatre’s logo to the colour of the restaurant napkins. After checking the light bulbs in the hall, he would stand in the wings at 8 o’clock sharp to push Bulle Ogier on stage for the overture of The Winter’s Tale. Where other managers would OK a press dossier after barely a look, he could spend hours at the photocopy machine reformatting the text and the placement of the photographs. Marianne Merleau-Ponty, in charge of publications, showed him every book, poster, pamphlet, programme before it went to print. Jacques Laemlé, his PR for the 1988 Shakespeares, was sharply told off for having designed an unlicensed booklet for Le Conte d’hiver that Chéreau found ill-matched to the Amandiers aesthetics. There was no communications strategy, no specific instructions

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given to Bacharach, but an all-controlling will to achieve perfection in every area. As Mnouchkine observed, he was aware of the adulation he received, and of the duty it carried to maintain his high standards.79 The quality of the food offered, whether spiritual or material, made the success of the place.80 It was an intoxicating experience, of an enclosed garden open onto the whole world. ‘We had everything on the spot, no need, and no wish, to go out.’81 Hazard and risk seemed the guiding philosophy of the place. Chéreau received a large annual subsidy, on a par with a national theatre’s, and far more liberty to spend it. A liberty filled with pitfalls, as the uses of the place exceeded all limits. An expensive and unsuccessful Quai Ouest brought the establishment near bankruptcy, but Chéreau immediately reacted with the decision to direct the next Koltès play, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, in a more intimate style, using pieces of scenery from the former one, and Les Amandiers slowly recovered, up to their triumphant visit to Avignon in 1988 with five separate events, an unprecedented feat in the Festival’s history. In Dort’s shrewd assessment, ‘the law of the Nanterre institution was imbalance: a sort of essential instability around a fixed pole.’ To him, ‘Nanterre-Amandiers only exists by and for a multi-shaped Chéreau’, the whole place revolves around his choices of projects and collaborators, choices ‘obeying the logic of his work, affinities and friendships’.82 The paradox was in the concept: a secluded place away from Paris, somewhere to experiment, in the tranquility and concentration of a Thébaïde (an isolated place of meditation), but one that needed to draw crowds, glamorous performers and media attention to reach its aims. Hard working it was, but never tranquil. The Nanterre years represented for Chéreau ‘a golden age. Imagine, at that time, for almost eight years, in Nanterre you had Koltès, Heiner Müller, Hervé Guibert and Jean Genet all visiting and working with us!’83 This was a slightly idealized vision of the past – Genet came twice: he was never a regular visitor, even during the rehearsals of Les Paravents – but there

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were plenty of other exciting visitors and events, famous directors, dramatists and musicians from around the world: ‘Not one inch of space remains vacant, the whole house is at work.’84 The huge boat anchored in this most uninviting of suburbs west of Paris became a focal point of cultural energies. Among their guests were internationally famous figures Robert Wilson, Peter Stein, Luca Ronconi, the writer/director Valère Novarina, old acquaintances like Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jérôme Deschamps, Bernard Sobel, André Engel, Boulez, Grüber, and new ones they helped into the limelight, like Luc Bondy and Claude Stratz. Film makers Jacques Doillon and André Téchiné came to work with the students.85 So did the drug dealers. Chéreau had developed a taste for cocaine since his Milan years, kept it up through the Ring in the Berlin nightclubs, and was joined in Nanterre by some heavy consumers. The place was soon described in the press as a den of ‘frenzied addiction’, an ‘explosive hangout’, but also ‘a unique experience. A place of encounters, transmission, passionate and permanent overheat.’86 A glorified press book was put together by Sylvie de Nussac at Chéreau’s request to show the full scope of the adventure.87 Chéreau hoped to create there a sort of theatrical Bauhaus where all arts would meet, develop something akin to fundamental research, possibly find an answer to his constant question: what is the theatre good for, is it still necessary? There was nothing natural about this art, and the competition of other media made, or should make, the question of its usefulness to the public a permanent one. He would not stand quarantined in its boundaries. ‘We refused to be no more than a machine spitting forth shows.’88 His own versatility and insatiable hunger were well served by his new instrument, which enabled him to adapt Platonov for the cinema in Hôtel de France, film it with the nineteen students of the Nanterre school, survive its flop, and mend it by directing Elsa Triolet’s translation of the original play at the Chartreuse for the next Avignon festival.89 Filming Platonov first was a severe handicap, he confessed on TV, no help to the staging at all: he

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could forget Chekhov completely while filming, but must return to him when he had to investigate ways of performing his play in the theatre. Platonov resurfaces among the ghosts of earlier productions in the worknotes of Hamlet, especially to berate his cowardice.90 Chéreau turned to Shakespeare at crucial points in his career, when he needed to explore themes and issues discussed in more recent plays, in constant debate with contemporary authors. His Platonov for the Avignon Festival in 1987 naturally led him to Hamlet the following year. It was during those years that Chéreau became renowned as a unique director of actors. Instead of watching them and shouting commands from the auditorium like Strehler or Antoine Vitez, he was the man who whispered in their ears, like Peter Brook. An obituary recalls his wizardly grace, a compact of loneliness and obstinacy, madness, pride, ambition, that made him irresistible to the ‘numbers of famous actors who endlessly yearn to be directed by him, and be crushed in the process by this “Patrice” whose name they murmur with adulation. Even after the infinite pains of rehearsing behind closed doors and be revealed to themselves at their own peril, possibly risk destruction, the actors worship Patrice Chéreau.’91 He was a muscular knot of contradictions, of conflicting imperatives. Isabelle Adjani felt he desperately wanted the actors to give him something he could not explicitly name because he was fully aware he had no right to demand it. He was bent on extracting spirit and desire from brute bodies, and in the process, he so mixed extreme delicacy with extreme brutality, his obsession with metamorphosis so transgressed all limits that watching his Rêve d’automne in the Louvre, watching the actors Pascal Greggory and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi mirror the tortured flesh of the surrounding canvasses, Adjani feared they were recreating the origins of those masterpieces at the peril of their own lives.92 Agnès Jaoui was no longer one of the cast, having rebelled against this man she considered an abominable tyrant, especially with the students who were entirely in his power. At the school he had disliked her on sight,

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she thought, much to her disappointment because she admired his work, and she soon returned his hostility. Even more than the director, she hated the atmosphere of submission, the ugly competition he had created inside the group, the discovery that people like to bow before a leader, in a spirit akin to the mentality of the Collaboration.93 She was not the only actress to feel scorned by Chéreau. Men generally found him more attractive to work with, though even his strongest supporters admit he could be dictatorial and rough. He was every inch a director, Pascal Greggory confirms, a leader, the captain of the ship: the part of young Napoleon, which he performed in Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte, suited him down to the ground. Chéreau himself made a distinction between institutional leaders and effective ones, and felt he belonged to the second category: ‘Chahine has seen through me, he knows who I am: a Saint-Just.’94 The ‘captain’ often attended his aides de camp’s rehearsals. Jacques Bonnaffé remembers him watching them from the flies while they rehearsed a Marivaux with Claude Stratz: he came to their premiere in Geneva, and after curtain-down, debriefed them for half an hour at machine-gun speed, going through every detail – good or bad – of the performance, lighting, rhythm, costumes, with no wish to hurt, offend or spare anyone. However difficult to work with, he had a genius for communicating his own desire, make actors and stagehands feel that they were part of something unique, that he needed them to make it happen. To Libolt, Chéreau was the first director who truly made him dream. He remembers the excitement of the rehearsals, the intensive work at the table, the books and pictures they were shown, those they read, the stories they were told. For Toller, they had done some serious reading on the Spartakist movement, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and so on’. He also recalls the pressure put on everyone, Chéreau’s overbearing presence, his physical closeness and vibrant energy, his demands for instant understanding and inventive propositions, and his quick temper when he did not get the effect wanted. With time, he learnt to be cooler, as he repeatedly

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claimed in interviews, or so he thought. Roland Amstutz, Hamlet’s Gravedigger, once grew so exasperated with the flow of instructions poured into his ear that he threw his shovel in the director’s hand, saying, ‘Go on, then, go on, you do it’, and walked out.

4 Hamlet Modern

‘I don’t believe in ghosts but I’m afraid of them’: a shock wave ran over the Cour d’honneur when a Knight of the Apocalypse galloped in as if sprung from the black void. Chéreau’s Hamlet marked the height of the Nanterre period. When Crombecque took over the management of the Festival d’Avignon, after years of running the Festival d’Automne – two pluridisciplinary events dedicated to modernity and world culture – he insisted that Chéreau come and direct a production in the Cour d’honneur.1 The plan was to bring the ‘full ensemble of a theatre’s forces in the spirit of Vilar’, give ‘a taste of the TNP in Avignon’ with a new play and a revival in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes, plus three smaller productions in other venues.2 After Vilar’s opening of the Festival with Richard II in 1947, Shakespeare seemed the obvious author to stage against the awesome façade of the Palais des Papes. But which play? Chéreau had circled around Shakespeare without confronting him again directly since his own iconoclastic Richard II, and the comedies he produced with the Nanterre students. His first thought was Richard III, but Desarthe reminded him of Ariel Garcia-Valdès’s brilliant interpretation of the part in the Cour d’honneur only three years before. Better choose Hamlet, which he himself had long dreamt of playing. Now Shakespeare was the focal point of energies at Les Amandiers. The 1987–8 season began in October with Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, directed by Robert Wilson, and

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Scènes d’un roi Lear (Jean-Marie Patte) as curtain raisers. The following spring, Luc Bondy staged The Winter’s Tale in a translation by Koltès, with a cast of famous actors, Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier, along with several former students from the school. At the time, Koltès was engaged in another play, Roberto Zucco, a cryptic rewriting of Hamlet.3 He was already the author of an ur-Zucco entitled Le jour des meurtres dans l’histoire d’Hamlet, based on Yves Bonnefoy’s translation of Shakespeare,4 the same translation that Chéreau was busy rehearsing. Regnault brought to the table Lacan’s seminars on Hamlet, freshly edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.5 He was moving on to co-direct the Théâtre de la Commune with Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman, and left Nanterre after one last piece of advice: have the company read What Happens in ‘Hamlet’. Chéreau commissioned me to translate it, and prefaced the translation with his assistant Claude Stratz while engaged in rehearsals.6 If Chéreau had initial doubts about staging a play which he claimed not to understand, in retrospect Hamlet must have seemed the perfect answer to the Festival’s invitation. Crombecque would recall with emotion those years when Vitez ‘tested the laws of Vilar’s aesthetics with Le Soulier de satin, as did Chéreau with Hamlet’.7 After brief consideration, the original plan of directing a new Koltès play was abandoned: Koltès required a more intimate space, as the recent fiasco of Quai Ouest had shown. His Retour au désert would be created the following autumn in a more conventional indoor space, the Théâtre du Rond-Point. To compensate, Chéreau included in the Nanterre project for Avignon a revival of Dans la solitude des champs de coton. Chéreau wanted to test Jean Vilar’s aesthetics of an open-air epic theatre and, indeed, nowhere did his Hamlet function as well as against the mighty backdrop of the Palais des Papes. The Cour then held 2,400 spectators, whom the actors had to face, coming in and out in open view, without prompter or microphone. That year, 1988, the Nanterre company took Avignon by storm. Both Hamlet and Le Conte d’hiver were performed in the Cour

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d’honneur, Koltès’s Solitude at La Courtine,8 Romans’s scenes from Chekhov, Chroniques d’une fin d’après-midi at the Cloître du Palais-vieux, Emilfork’s production of his Journée des chaussures in the Chapelle des Cordeliers. An exhibition of photography completed the Amandiers parade. The productions shared the actors, the scenographer Richard Peduzzi, who designed all but the set for Chroniques, the costume designer Moidele Bickel, the whole technical and the administrative team who came along: over a hundred people altogether. Several of the actors were former students of the Nanterre school: Marianne Denicourt (Ophelia, Shepherdess), Vincent Perez (Laertes, Treplev), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Nina), Marc Citti (Osric, Florizel, Ivan), Agnès Jaoui (Carlotta Ivanovna), Bruno Todeschini (Rosencrantz, Shepherd, Lopakhin), Olivier Rabourdin (Guildenstern, Trofimov), Thibaud de Montalembert (Horatio, Dion, Ivan), all of whom made names for themselves on stage or screen. Other more seasoned ones were or became regulars of Chéreau’s team: Nada Strancar, Roland Amstutz, Pascal Greggory, and of course Gérard Desarthe, his earlier Bolingbroke, Gravedigger’s Boy, and Peer Gynt. There may have been another element of rivalry in the choice of Hamlet. When Regnault pointed out that Vitez had recently directed a full-length version at Chaillot, Chéreau replied he had no problem with that. He was led to this choice quite naturally by Chekhov, whose Seagull was modelled on Hamlet, whose Platonov the Amandiers students were rehearsing to perform at the nearby Chartreuse: ‘Working our way with Chekhov, who constantly refers to Hamlet, helped us understand that Hamlet is, like Platonov, a play about doubt, questioning, lack of certainties.’9 In both ‘there is the reference to weariness and failure’. There, at the sensitive heart of the play, where old beliefs vacillate, one discovers in solitude that the world is multiple, and ordained not by one faith but myriads. This is why ‘Shakespeare stands at the heart of a brotherhood of writers who make constant reference to him’, and Hamlet is a play ‘every director must confront himself with. Readiness is all.’10

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Interaction 1: Koltès’s Shakespeare Other Nanterre productions at the 1988 Avignon Festival, we saw above, included Bondy’s Winter’s Tale, Chekhov, and Dans la solitude des champs de coton in which Chéreau now played the Dealer, to the great displeasure of Koltès who wanted the part performed by a black actor. All those elements coalesced in complex ways, with Solitude providing an echo to this Hamlet. Koltès’s part in the Shakespeare process deserves further investigation. Regnault led the inquiry, focusing on the young playwright’s rejection of the traditional dialogue, a mode of writing that paved Chéreau’s way to the treatment of Hamlet’s soliloquies.11 Koltès’s characters hardly communicate; each one is locked up in the interior world, or jail, of his desires. The deal they discuss has no explicit content, but hides under a Shakespearian costuming: ‘Facing you is like facing men who dress like women dressing like men, in the end you don’t know what sex you are looking at’, the Client protests.12 The origin of Roberto Zucco was a ‘Wanted’ poster that Koltès saw stuck on the walls of the Parisian underground stations in February 1988, showing the picture of a killer who had committed a string of crimes in the Savoie region. The man used various pseudonyms before he was identified as Roberto Succo, who had murdered both his parents at age 19.13 Arrested in Venice on 28 February, Succo escaped from his cell, stood on the roof of the prison, took off his clothes, and harangued those watching for over an hour until he jumped down from the roof, and was returned to his cell, having duly captured the attention of the media. ‘He seemed aware that his attractive body would make a great story, and he posed and paced for the crowd below, asking whether there were any journalists there.’14 There were. The ‘crazed killer’, sometimes misspelt Zucco, became front-page news, portrayed as a man of multiple identities, a motiveless monster, or a mythic hero driven by fate like a new Arthur Rimbaud. His stunt on the roof would frame the action of Koltès’s play. Having been diagnosed as ‘irresponsible’ by Italian psychiatrists,

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Succo got away with a mild sentence, causing an indignant French judge to denounce his deliberate manipulation of the press as a ‘comedy’. Six weeks later he killed himself in his cell with the same device he had used to kill his father, by placing a plastic bag around his head. Roberto Zucco, Koltès’s last work, was completed just before his death in April 1989 and first performed at the Schaubühne in 1990. Various reviewers stressed unwarranted parallels between the fates of the young writer fighting AIDS and of his perturbed hero. Koltès denied any identification with the murderer, but he was attracted by his ‘mythic trajectory’, and upgraded it from the category of fait divers (news item) to the level of Greek tragedy: ‘That he killed his father and then himself is mythical, it’s a classic course, a Greek one.’15 Chéreau did not direct this last play. And yet, had Koltès been alive, it would have met his ideal for a modern production, casting and rehearsing a text while the author still brings in freshly written scenes. He found it entirely different from those he had already directed, and felt even more troubled by it.16 In a document filmed by Bernard’s brother, François, he confesses the playwright had asked him to ‘stay away’ from it, after disagreements over the design of Le Retour au désert.17 The polemics that attended the performances of Roberto Zucco at the Comédie-Française in 2007 are outside the scope of this volume.18 Koltès is a world unto himself: no attempt will be made here to enter his universe further than the points where it intersected with Hamlet and with Chéreau’s metatheatrical reflection on the play. There was no escaping Hamlet. Zucco’s urge to free himself from all forms of inheritance leads him to kill his parents. At the opening, he appears like a ghost to the two guards who are discussing possible routes of escape. The Gamine’s Sister hums fragments of songs to keep away sorrow, and expresses her disgust of men in a scene entitled ‘Ophelia’. The original Succo quoted ‘To be or not to be’ in his testamentary confession. Zucco puns on bier and beer, and has a long soliloquy in the scene ‘Juste avant de mourir’, just as Koltès raced with his own

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death. But how to integrate this soliloquy in the play? The answer was to have it delivered in the solitude of a disconnected telephone booth.19 Words are like ‘a scar after a fight’, imprinted on the other’s skin.20 Koltès hated the mechanical give-andtake of dialogue. In his earlier plays, the characters do not converse; they tell their life story in parallel speeches, or cross monologues in a constant dialogue of the deaf. It was this specific quality of Koltès’s writing that gave Chéreau access to Shakespeare’s soliloquies. Zucco’s dying speech held the key to the enigma of the character, ‘like Hamlet’s. But in the end, there is nothing to understand. Zucco remains an enigma: a fascinating murderer but an absolute enigma.’21 Hamlet seems to address the public eight times or more. When directing Desarthe in the part, he told him to act as if he were performing a play written by Koltès. Chéreau explicitly connected the two authors. Having played the Dealer in Solitude, a role that enabled him to ‘masticate the writing, day after day, and come to understand it from the inside’, left traces in him which he hoped ‘were found in Hamlet’.22 To Bernard Dort, the co-existence of these two plays, a virtuoso expression of classic Western dramaturgy and an opaque text where myth and daily business did not exactly overlap, was not just a well-ordered alternation of classic and modern, of confirmation and experiment, but two complementary questionings of the individual’s place in the world and his doubts.23 Chéreau’s Shakespeare is anything but a timeless poet; he engages artists and audiences at different times and cultures into a fresh understanding of his plays. The director’s guiding aim was to make this masterpiece equally clear to the audience. Koltès found the Avignon Hamlet a tremendous shock, of an intensity he experienced no more than once every ten years in the theatre, though many times a year in the cinema. He felt he was understanding a play he had never understood before.24 While Chéreau read Dover Wilson, Bondy’s team were rehearsing The Winter’s Tale, and reading essays on Shakespeare’s ‘solstitial play’. ‘The guy taught me liberty’,

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Koltès declared when questioned about his translation; the play freed him from the three unities, ‘that bullshit’.25 Shakespeare skipped years and changed locations when he wanted: ‘his characters enter when they have something to say, and they leave once they have said it’.26 In his Bohemia ‘there is no more difference between man and bear than between sky and earth.’ As Koltès worked his way through the text, he found ‘there is not one cue that does not clarify another’.27 Shakespeare’s English was simple and unaffected, he felt. Accordingly, he strove to make it sound so with injections of modern slang, a choice that did not meet unanimous approval.28 Rising to the defence of this ‘strange translation’, Chéreau stressed his belief that ‘Shakespeare is better translated by a writer like Koltès or a poet like Bonnefoy – whose translation I used for Hamlet – than by a translator.’29 In the theatre, he further insisted, he would rather have the interpretation, even a slightly false one, of a poet, than the more exact text of a professional without a specific idiom. The experience with Koltès taught him it is always best to work with genuine authors. Chéreau thought having laboured on his soliloquies could help him with Shakespeare’s, that he had found a link and a way of speaking that could connect them: ‘Sure it is that my return to Shakespeare bore the mark of Koltès.’30 While they were rehearsing in Avignon, he even thought at one point to make him translate the Gravedigger’s scene he had difficulty staging. His marks on the typescript point out parallels with The Winter’s Tale, the opening scene at Leontes’ court, or a note on the passing of time and the clash of generations in the shepherds’ lines, when ‘the children take the place of their fathers’.31

Interaction 2: Bonnefoy’s Hamlet Desarthe, who so longed to play Hamlet, made no secret of his preference for Jean-Michel Déprats’ translation, but Chéreau stuck to his own partiality for a writer’s text, and the unique

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relation he believes a poet has with his maternal language. Bonnefoy’s was the only French one in blank verse, ‘the only one that gives to French audiences the rhythmicality, the song’.32 Even if it was less reliable than a specialist’s, he preferred it to Déprats’ more directly theatrical approach, designed to impulse an actor’s gestus and ‘preserve the theatricality’ of Shakespeare’s text.33 It was Bonnefoy’s literary quality, his more sophisticated, philosophical turns of phrase Chéreau was after. The acting strength, the vocal energy, the stresses, he preferred to monitor himself. In the Financial Times Anthony Curtis deplores ‘what happens to homespun English phrases such as “You speak like a green girl” ’ when Bonnefoy sets his pen to them: ‘The most controversial of his renderings is to translate the word “play” in “the play’s the thing” into the more generalised “theatre” ’.34 A legitimate complaint: Bonnefoy often develops Shakespeare’s raw image into the idea it carries, or poeticizes his crudities. ‘This mortal coil’ is transmuted to ‘le tumulte de vivre’. ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’ becomes ‘l’anxiété des rêves qui viendront dans ce sommeil des morts’; Ophelia’s ‘weedy trophies’ are raised to the dignity of ‘agrestes’, the Gravedigger’s ‘Why, here in Denmark’ to ‘Parbleu! La raison d’Etat’, while ‘c’est l’obstacle’ loses the material contact of ‘ay, there’s the rub’. Hamlet’s ‘fruitful river in the eye’ is glossed as ‘fleuves intarissables nés des yeux seuls’, ‘Passing through nature to eternity’ as ‘quitter notre condition pour regagner l’éternel’. An academic’s close study of the text diagnoses that ‘Sometimes Bonnefoy listens to Shakespeare, sometimes he answers him and seems to want to impose his answer.’35 His inroads into the characters’ psychology brought nuances to their stage interpretation. Bonnefoy’s Polonius, for one, was graver, more ponderous, didactic, where Déprats’ was more spontaneous and colloquial.36 On stage, Bernard Ballet gave him a dangerous edge with no trace of comedy in him. Chéreau’s dealings with texts had matured since his jostling with Richard II. At the time, Bonnefoy had seen Leyris leave the Odéon in anger but ‘that was in 1970, when Patrice was

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very young’, whereas in 1988 he definitely ‘read the play word by word with the urge to untangle thoughts and driving intentions at every level of their writing’. He would not be content until he felt he understood each word. The work they did together deeply affected them both. They had never met when Bonnefoy read in the newspapers that Chéreau had chosen his translation. He remembers a truly modest man, immediately friendly, a laughing presence tinged with melancholy and anxiety, who often mentioned his childhood and adolescence, his mother, to whom he was offering a trip to America on the Concorde for her birthday, his father who had educated his artistic tastes. When asked what Chéreau expected of him, Bonnefoy explains that he wanted a clarification of the text, its thought-provoking ambiguities, a text he took most seriously, with little trace of his youthful cavalier style.37 What he expected from Shakespeare was less clear. In Bonnefoy’s view, Chéreau must have envied Shakespeare’s ability to look life and death in the face, to accept the destiny designed for us by our contradictions. He was fascinated by the power that urgent drives exercise over the will, ‘but even more by our reactions to such constraints, attitudes of resistance or surrender, self-illusion or lucid thought, at the highest level of the self’. He felt deeply moved by Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia, their love that might have created meaning and order in the world around them, the suspicions that destroy it. Bonnefoy thought he heard in Chéreau, via Shakespeare, an echo of his own concern with the latent misogyny and narcissism of Petrarchan lovers. In the case of Hamlet, women are their first victims.38 On a different wavelength, Chéreau found support in Bonnefoy’s preface for the Gallimard edition, where the poet discusses the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from religion to conscience, while ‘at the same time we need to find what this can tell us now, in a period when certainties crumble’.39 Bonnefoy insists on ‘the central importance of the opposition of two beings who clearly represent the succession of the two eras, a contrast all the more striking for being established between a father and a son who

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bear the same name’. There is no doubt that ‘in Hamlet we see clearly, deeply, specifically the problems of a consciousness awakening to a condition that was undreamed of and unimaginable only the day before: a world without structure, truths which henceforth are only partial, contradictory, in competition with one another – as many signs as one could wish, and soon far too many, but nothing that will resemble a sacred order or meaning’.40 Hamlet ‘suffers from no longer being able to inhabit his father’s universe’, the values and beliefs of the medieval consciousness King Hamlet embodied; ‘he is in mourning of the ancient world and faces the void created by its collapse from his “sterile promontory” ’.41 Indeed, he is a Mallarmean Hamlet, with whom Bonnefoy entertained a life-long dialogue, the emblematic figure of the poet, perpetually tempted to sacrifice reality, the other, the idealized woman, to his dreaming activity, his creation of symbols.42 In his wake, Desarthe argued that the nunnery scene must be performed as a sacrifice.43 As was his wont, Chéreau built current questions and psychological tensions on a strong basis of historical matter. The crucial evolution he observed between the hero’s two soliloquies reflects the transition from medieval to early modern age, an intermediary stage both bestial and human: ‘O that this too too sullied flesh’ is archaic, childish and emotional, entirely devoid of analysis, whereas ‘To be or not to be’ speaks the language of an adult who thinks like a philosopher.44 Hamlet is ‘a fiercely neurasthenic character, who hovers between action and conscience, he wants to know whether action is or is not useless’.45 Bonnefoy had first translated Hamlet at the request of Leyris for the Club Français du Livre, a bilingual edition of the complete works where Chéreau originally read Shakespeare, and which he used for Richard II. By the time his version of Hamlet was staged, Bonnefoy had revised it three times, and he would revise it once more after working with Chéreau.46 Both of them took notes during their conversations: ‘So we discussed numerous details, and our talks enabled me to improve this translation which has now been long on its way

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to the best I can do.’47 Their exchanges about characters and plot led him to consult newer editions of the English text, and to make significant alterations in some twenty passages. The crudeness of Ophelia’s Valentine song, for instance, had escaped him: ‘I had let myself be taken in by this sort of melody, made of innocence and transparency, which I imagined in her mouth, and I had made speech ancillary to that tune.’ He enjoyed their working sessions, and enjoyed meeting a present-day stage director who did not think Shakespeare was a contemporary: Chéreau wanted to understand the categories now dissipated that opened to him the realm of the universal, hoping he would find anew the movement, the heat of the moment of invention, of intuition that makes all great works.48 To Bonnefoy, the play dramatizes a crisis in belief, when the old Hamlet returns from a dreamt beyond, whose doors he found closed. On Chéreau’s stage, his horse signified life without a verbal language, operating a shift towards ‘not to be’, the locus of our anxiety, the night in our speech, relaying the opening ‘Who’s there?’ in a perfectly Shakespearean manner. ‘The rest is silence’ suggests that the question remains unanswered. This interactive relationship with Chéreau is but the beginning of the story. Their English text was based on Dover Wilson’s edition of Hamlet for which the Club Français du Livre had paid the copyright, but in the present 1980s, compared with Bonnefoy’s favourite, the Arden text, it felt largely obsolete, ‘the work of an old erudite armed with a big magnifying glass’.49 What Bonnefoy thought he needed to do with the original – check the variant versions of the play, compare and choose which specific term made more sense – the director did with the translations. A succession of annotated typescripts bear marks of his progress through the text with his then assistant Matthew Jocelyn, copies of passages in English, reminders to check Q1, Q2, F, references to critical essays, self-injunctions at the actors’ Prologue to re-read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Richard III on the mechanisms of power.50 While working at the table they had half a dozen French versions open before them to pick and choose from. I

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well remember the shoplifting during a rehearsal of ‘espions légitimes’, and of ‘neveu, moins fils que tu ne veux’ to translate ‘a little more than kin and less than kind’. Desarthe’s memory must be misleading him when he claims now that he suggested Bonnefoy:51 all testimonies confirm his preference at the time for Déprats’ translation, from which he made his own creative selection on stage. Bonnefoy, by his own admission, was no great theatregoer. Those who enjoy plays in performance were shocked when he declared in Le Monde that Shakespeare should be performed in the dark: ‘one would see nothing but one would hear, and better perceive how words breathe in the text.’52 He did not like Shakespeare to be confined within the walls of an auditorium. So how could these contrarieties agree? Where did he and Chéreau meet? Their visions of the theatre did not fundamentally differ, he argued, they were ‘Two perspectives, two approaches of human action which, more often than not, the performance of a play keeps far apart, but occasionally they draw nearer, and induce similar conclusions. Even in the case of Shakespeare I would probably have stood far from Chéreau if he had directed Titus Andronicus. But this was Hamlet, a play born from poetry, and I felt no reservations, I perfectly understood his decisions.’53

Interaction 3: Denmark’s ghost writers The first shock for the spectators who were used to Peduzzi’s tall structures was his horizontal/below-stage scenography: a seventeenth-century palatial façade laid down before the high wall of the medieval Palais des Papes ‘like a fallen giant’,54 its triangular top facing the audience, a pictorial exposure of the dramatic fight with the forces of the past. Peduzzi thought of Hamlet as a work in progress, a page to be turned in the history of the world. His original plan was of two symmetrical sets, one laid down for Hamlet, one vertical for The Winter’s Tale, with scaffolding to keep it up in the wind, but the technical

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manager Frédéric Lefèvre, ‘a real juggernaut’, thought it too risky and costly. Luc Bondy gave in, and with the support of an unusually cautious Chéreau, Lefèvre had the set of the Tale cut down to an insignificant height, despite Peduzzi’s furious protests. But scenographer and director agreed that there would be no factory chimneys in Denmark, as was the current fashion of German and British directors: this was to be another world, another rhythm. The wooden marquetry in varied colours was a modulation of positives and negatives, a smooth surface pierced with traps, each square foot a movable panel over spyholes, pits, trenches, graves. While Hamlet swore the guards to secrecy, the Ghost pushed up elements of the set from underground, punctuating each oath and increasing their fears he might be in league with hell. Bonnefoy, for one, was memorably impressed by this enigmatic machine of symbols and abyssal virtualities. He warmly praised ‘this large table of a doomed game that you were able to build. Intimately acquainted with the play as I was, it surprised and won me.’55 The theatrical space had been several times reorganized since Vilar, but kept to its basic idea, a simple surf movement fluctuating from the backrows to the edge of the set, sweeping the characters in its to-and-fro rhythm.56 The vastness of the Cour d’honneur, expanded by its fourth dimension, allowed the director to deploy the symbolic breadth of the play, and incorporate the layers of meaning piled on by successive ages. It also dictated the use of bright colour for the costumes, red and blue for the royal couple, instead of Chéreau’s favoured subdued tones. The exhibition Shakespeare, l’étoffe du monde in 2014, with a scene recreated from Hamlet, offered a last chance to see at close range the beauty, opulence and meticulous quality of the costumes.57 The lighting effects helped focus the spectators’ eyes on the characters chosen at crucial moments such as the pantomime.58 ‘We are not looking at a picture, we enter a tormented space and become part of it’, Chéreau explained: the mechanical gliding of elements in the set echoed the ‘time out of joint’ as if one stood ‘on an empty

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shore, on the edge of a universe of waves and wind’.59 Yet Benhamou detects an appeasement from the earlier crisis that affected his own artistic gesture by casting doubt on his own art. There is no austerity now in its dramatic rigour, but the strange fantasy of the set, and a more smiling melancholy. The lighting too has evolved since André Diot’s effects of natural daylight, progressive variations of sunrise or twilight, or the nocturnal penumbra of Massacre. Daniel Delannoy’s lights shift abruptly, sometimes in the middle of a scene, stressing artificiality. The house lights are turned on after The Mousetrap. New relations are created between the characters with pursuits moving around, circling or cutting them off, creating and erasing images, in phase with the pulse of the acting.60 After the set, the second shock for the audience was the heart-stopping entrance of the Ghost, mounted on a huge black thoroughbred straight from Füssli’s Night Mare, who threatened to trample anyone standing in his way and sent all the watchers running for cover. Hamlet fell on his knees and writhed on the ground, as if felled by the spirit of his father. At his questions, the horse reared up, drawing him away from the guards who tried to hold him back and were threatened by the rider’s sword. Images and sounds of chords, drums, sighs and sobs punctuated the action, evocative of Doomsday. Hamlet, an elegant, impetuous youth at his entrance, comes out of the interview irreparably broken, and takes refuge in a variety of masks, playing the buffoon, to fill the void of despair and hold off madness. On the way, Chéreau discovered affinities he was not aware of with the hero: ‘I know him. I know his contradictions. He is close to me as one feels close to someone who is beyond help. But he also irritates me, with this habit he has of wanting to judge everything, find the key to all things at any cost. But he has a sense of humour. I think he is unfair to his mother. That I understand, and I understand his loneliness.’61 What most drew Chéreau to Hamlet was the character’s relentless questioning: ‘What is it that makes a man bear everything instead of shooting himself? This is Hamlet the Wunderkind,

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the tormented, hypersensitive soul, who deliberately puts himself at the nexus of all the discontents, all the contradictions of the world. To the point of madness, but without ever stopping to analyse his own madness. This is when I find him closest to me.’62 It is no coincidence if his own youthful memories flowed in during his conversations with Bonnefoy. His father died during the rehearsals in Avignon, and he travelled by car through the night to bid him farewell. The dutiful son would later include some of the late painter’s canvasses in his own Louvre exhibition. Desarthe long wondered why Chéreau suddenly chose to set the players’ entrance to the tune of ‘God’, until he heard that Prince had written the song at the death of his own father. It was via Hamlet that Freud elaborated the Œdipus complex theory, Chéreau knew, but thought it no reason to bring it on stage: ‘psychoanalysis is the antinomy of theatre, it reasons on acts that in the theatre must remain mysterious and surprising.’63 If there was any need at all of psychoanalysis, it should be applied to Hamlet’s strange combination of puritanism and clownery: ‘I know, I do, how to make this manic-depressive guy play the clown.’64 Despite these reservations, the production bore significant traces of Lacan’s reading. After his experience of meeting with the Ghost, the Prince suffers from ‘depersonalization’. King Hamlet was poisoned through the ear, and it is poison that his words pour in his son’s ears. After this episode, Ophelia is ‘dissolved as a love object.’ She becomes for him ‘the very symbol of the rejection of his desire.’ It was in Lacan that Chéreau read the phallic undertones of Ophelia’s song, the Orchis mascula popularly called dead men’s finger, which he in turn brought to Bonnefoy’s attention. To Lacan, the play is a ‘tragedy of desire’, ‘the drama of Hamlet as the man who has lost the way of his desire.’ Only when Ophelia is dead does she become again the object of his desire, which regains its immediacy and worth. Only when he is mortally wounded himself can he wound his enemy.65 Another dimension of Hamlet is as ‘a tragedy of the underworld. The ghost arises from an inexpiable offense.’66

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The debt he has been unable to pay seals off any possibility of retribution. Hamlet, unlike Œdipus, knows the crime committed, and knows he can never redeem it. Is the hero’s antic disposition feigned, histrionic, or does his make-believe drive him over the edge, to mental illness? How to interpret ‘I must be idle’, translated by Bonnefoy as ‘Je dois faire le fou’, which means either I must play the madman, or the fool, and by Déprats as ‘Je dois faire le niais’, the simpleton? Chéreau’s Hamlet is broken not so much by doubts about the Ghost’s nature, nor the revelation of the truth, but the weight of this world out of joint laid on his shoulders, and the impossible duty to set it right. He is surrounded by doublefaced grotesques, like the duet Rosencrantz–Guildenstern. All play a part, emphasizing the ‘world as theatre’ tone of his own dislocation. The company of players in modern dress who enter shyly from the auditorium seem to fear a possibly hostile court, and breathe audible relief at Hamlet’s warm greeting. These genuine ‘legitimate’ actors expose the artifices of the whole Danish court, of the courtiers held under scrutiny by self-proclaimed ‘legitimate spies’, and their rulers. Polonius is anything but a harmless old fool. He is established as a bully even before he speaks his first line, by his furious reaction to Laertes’ wish to leave Denmark, and Claudius’s restraining gesture when Polonius wants to hit him. It was the counsellor who paved the way to Claudius’s usurpation of the crown, he who reigns at home like the heaviest of heavy fathers. But Chéreau had already done enough ‘power epics’: he discarded the usurpation as only ‘an intermittent scandal’, a sideline, not a permanent grievance for the deprived heir, though Claudius feels his presence to be a constant threat. Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes, even the fierce Fortinbras are all struggling under the weight of a father’s will. This figure of the oppressive father was not borrowed straight from Chéreau’s own father, though he may have been a ghostly and obsessive one, often absent from the family home. Regnault, who knew both Chéreau’s parents, remembers how affectionate they were, and immensely proud of him.

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Other forms of authorities exercised a more oppressive weight. Reading a play means to re-read, sometimes erase, its successive staged versions, beginning with Vitez’s ghost in armour. In the background to French Hamlets stood Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry’s vision of the impending death of civilization after the First World War: ‘From an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basel to Cologne, and touches the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of ghosts.’67 Valéry’s Hamlet, ‘representing the European intellectual, is not merely unable to cope with an over-heavy task, he no longer knows what the task might be or even if there is a task at all’.68 Closer to us, the philosopher Michel Serres stresses its connection with the Freudian dogma as it was taught in universities and bourgeois sitting-rooms: ‘While some lectured on the murder of the father, a handful of others around the world, during the first and second World Wars, decided to put to death tens of millions of young men under twenty-five’, all the murdered sons sacrificed to the paternal monster of war.69 Later, when directing Phèdre, Chéreau would declare that ‘we live in a world where fathers are stronger than sons, they kill them’.70 The central crux of his Hamlet was the command to revenge, laid as a sacred duty now on the three sons’ shoulders and ultimately on Elektra’s. The Iron Curtain and the Soviet State were near their end when the company went on a tour that included Moscow, part of the opening policy of the Glasnost. They were welcomed like stars in Berlin, and dined with Peter Stein’s actors, but had no intimations of the forthcoming events.71 While they played in Moscow, Chéreau was filmed outside the Lenin shrine, meditating on the haunting presence of a ghost ‘far more cumbersome than Hamlet’s, a spook in whom many people believed, including myself at a time’.72 Audiences inured to more rebellious Hamlets were intrigued by his apolitical version of the play, like this young Russian spectator who had already seen five different productions of Hamlet and found his mise-en-scène amazing. The European tour left its mark on

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the interpretation. Fortinbras was no longer the Renaissance dandy of the early days but a bald-headed, blood-stained, blind accessory of fate. The Hamlet performed in Moscow was neither an intellectual nor a warrior, but a showman interpreting various aspects of dramatic art, building up a complicity with the players, and beyond them with an audience whose majority did not speak French. They were confused on the first night by this Hamlet, both different from their tradition of the intellectual dissenter and removed from current affairs, but they soon reacted to the tragic movement of masks. A reviewer was especially struck by the vivid contrast between the refined and impetuous hero of the beginning and the limp broken creature crawling on the floor after the impact of the Ghost’s visit.73 They grew increasingly attracted to the clowning Hamlet, whose features Desarthe accentuated in the following performances.74

Interaction 4: Actors’ exits and entrances Chéreau’s method of approaching a play is to read all he can find about its past history, context, parallels, echoes, then discard everything, start from the raw text, the bare set, the nude flesh, bodies level with the ground among raised pillars or aggressive machinery. To him, the heart of a plot, its secret thought, lies hidden; it may be something that never gets told, and has to be found.75 The need to break the crust, search the hidden depths of the story, runs parallel with a search for the secret soul of the actor.76 He admits to a fascination for violence, the clash of bodies thrown against each other, of human relations he compares to a ‘rugby melee: all linked in embrace, throwing kicks at each other’.77 In the pantomime, the Player King did not just die; he writhed in agony, while his Player Queen writhed in near demented sorrow. Actors were not expected to be obedient or await instructions, but to

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invent, move, offer suggestions, give flesh to words, break acting traditions, never do what they knew how to do. They must come naked, i.e. divested of prior experience and technique, attack each new role as if new to the stage. He often rehearsed them separately, encouraged them to search their weaknesses and draw on hidden wounds to investigate their character.78 These are constants of Chéreau’s work with actors, yet Desarthe, after several years of absence, found his work methods had altered since Peer Gynt when he came ‘with a new idea every minute’. There was no dramaturgy to speak of, at least not in front of them, no room left for improvisation, and Chéreau ‘vampirized’ all they could offer. If true, this may be due to the stress of his multiple responsibilities. The early habit of writing down his thoughts on the work in progress seems to have dried up. There are no extensive notes on Hamlet in the IMEC archives, though the annotated typescripts bear numerous marks of punctual revisions to the text, and brief stage directions. The element of danger was paramount in rehearsals. Hamlet may suffer from Freudian symptoms but he is first and foremost to Chéreau ‘a man who receives full face all the tensions and contradictions. I always feel he is crossing a roundabout in the middle of traffic.’79 Before work started on stage, he told the actors stories, anecdotes, memories, street scenes, to ignite their imagination. Several of them testify to the danger of working with Chéreau. He drives actors to extremes, to the edge of their insecurity, summons up their most violent phantasies in rehearsal, exposes their frailties. This invisible frontier from which they may never return is precisely what interests him, Laurence Bourdil recalls: ‘He is a healer and a wrecker, if he saves he can also destroy. All at once he knows and does not know what he carries within himself.’80 To work with him, Desarthe and others confirm, is to undertake a long journey into the night. But nearly all of them are ready to start again. According to Didier Sandre, ‘he does not “think” his shows so much as sweats, bleeds, oozes them, maybe he does not work through elements that can be formulated’.81 Sandre’s

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own experiment as Lelio in Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivante was double edged: he much resented the fact that Chéreau spent all his attention on his star actors, Jane Birkin and Michel Piccoli, and reduced the others to underlings, even if he feels retrospectively that having to invent his own part, he learnt something crucial then, in the effort towards his own transparency. With such a director, he would never progress above the level of a Lelio, he felt at the time, and firmly refused his offer to play Claudius in Hamlet. Chéreau describes his own methods with actors as ‘artisanales’ (craftsman’s work), cross-breeding what he learnt from theatre, film, music, painting. There must be no automation backstage either. He expects an active role from the technicians. They must follow the pulse and movement of the actor, the rhythm of the show, which is never quite identical from one evening to the next. In Avignon, the sound system especially was difficult, the open air a challenge, because there was no amplification; the actors had to compete with the mistral wind. When consulted on this point, Nada Strancar, who had played Lucrèce Borgia for Vitez in the Cour d’honneur, told Chéreau the only way was to speak straight to the audience, never mind his preference for oblique lines: ‘So I did. I directed Hamlet as I would have an opera.’82 He must ‘create situations, relations, slant lines, balances of power by always placing the one who speaks face to the audience. Having directed operas was a great help. And the bravery of the actors.’83 After the private sessions with Bonnefoy, work began, as in former productions, with weeks of discussions at the table. Chéreau’s motto, like Peter Stein’s, is that what is not understood by the actors will not be performed. The meaning of each line, each word, had to be clarified again with them. He did not share his overall vision of the play, Rabourdin recalls, but demanded that they fully concentrate on each cue, play it ‘in the extreme present’. The translation of What Happens in ‘Hamlet’, commissioned by Théâtre des Amandiers, was part of the clarifying process. Chéreau thought it would be helpful

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to the actors with its answers to queries ranging from the nature of ghosts to the rules of duelling. It was but one of the numerous tales they heard or were told to read. Marc Citti, who played several minor parts – Bernardo, a comedian, a lord, Osric, along with Bondy’s Florizel – recalls the constant references to Dover Wilson during those weeks.84 He also remembers his fright when they first practised on the parking lot with an unusual actor, a horse named Buffalo who shook majestic hooves inches from his face. Dover Wilson imbued them all with the urgent need to make the Ghost a terrifying reality, and the concluding duel a fight for life. Chéreau rose to the challenge, where most French directors before him had taken the easy way out with dispensable ghosts and flimsy stage foils. Benhamou had always thought the duel a conventional episode. To her amazement, after four hours of performance, they were about to attend a duel fought in real time, as if reality was breaking through theatrical duration. After his harrowing soul-searching, Hamlet was again a fighter, bringing an incredible surge of vitality to the funereal conclusion. It summed up for her the happiness of the theatre, an act of survival whatever the pains caused by its uttering, the pleasure shared, as in a football match, between auditorium and audience.85 The play closed on one last image: Fortinbras dipped his fingers in Hamlet’s blood and smeared his face with it, indicating a new reign of oppressive terror. The same actor, Pascal Greggory, would repeat the gesture decades later in a completely different ritual, mourning the death of his son Hippolyte in Phèdre. The duel, a fierce fight with the actors wielding both dagger and sword, took three months of daily practice under the tuition of a fencing master. One evening in Berlin Alain Libolt, who played Laertes, broke his rival’s sword and saw the tip fly straight towards the audience before planting itself in one of the alley ways. There was a brief, deathly pause before Osric walked up to the duellists with a change of weapons. During the Nanterre performances, both actors got wounded. Libolt had been invited to replace Vincent Pérez by a laughing

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Chéreau – ‘I know, it’s not a gratifying part, you’re on for one scene at the beginning, a short one, then you come back at the end, full of beans, and that’s it, it’s over, with three hours waiting in between’ – and could not resist this alluring proposal. Greggory had been promoted from Fortinbras to Horatio, although the very tall Desarthe did not appreciate ‘le petit gros’, as he called him, who came from a different background, the Banier set of golden boys subsidized by Liliane Bettencourt.86 By all testimonies, Greggory acted poorly at the beginning, and had to work hard under Chéreau’s tireless coaching to master the part. Desarthe did not like his first Claudius either, Robin Renucci, who was younger than himself. When the production went on tour, the royal couple were replaced by the Player King and Queen, Nada Strancar and Wladimir Yordanoff. This Hamlet was graced by two formidable star actors, Desarthe and the riding Ghost. In Shakespeare’s plays, ‘entries are integrated in the dramaturgy, they present no difficulty’, Chéreau had confidently declared some years before.87 That was forgetting the Ghost. Earlier King Hamlets commonly entered through a trap, or were lifted down from the skies, but Desarthe declared he could not believe nor make believe in a ghost so rusty. Chéreau did not want his Ghost to walk: no one could be scared by a walking armour – probably a lash at Vitez’s hieratic, uncanny Ghost. His characters must appear as if by magic, hidden by a cloak, or a massed group of people, then suddenly materialize. On the opening at Avignon, the audience gasped when his riding Ghost leapt in, made up to look like a decaying corpse. Chéreau answered the same need with a similar technique, and a different vehicle, not borrowing a stunt from the cinema, when he used a car to launch the actors on the stage of Combat de nègre. Desarthe prided himself on having brought dynamism and dynamite to the part of Hamlet.88 According to his interviewer, whose own memories of past productions must have been scarce, he had broken with the ethereal and romantic interpretations of the hero. His performance was indeed epoch-

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making in France, though for other reasons than this alleged breach. Desarthe quoted various memorable Hamlets he had seen: Albert Finney in Peter Hall’s production, Jacobi for the BBC , Bruno Ganz at the Schaübuhne directed by Grüber. He was 43 at the time, and felt he had an appointment that could not be escaped with this most enigmatic of characters. Much has been written about the procrastination of the hero, but this is to ignore the facts of the play, Desarthe points out: from the moment he is entrusted with the Ghost’s mission, the Wittenberg student throws himself into action. Hamlet’s world is a gigantic parody of ‘seems’, ‘all is false, all is true’, and he a mass of conflicting impulses. One minute he declares that the intensity deployed on stage wastes itself for nothing, for Hecuba; and the next, he ends his soliloquy with a splendid act of faith in the theatre. Facing Ophelia, he is torn between love for her and bitterness at her betrayal, moved by such passion that the actress could never know from one evening to the next on which side of the stage she would fall. Déprats rightly stresses the remarkable inventiveness of his performance:89 this Prince showed an exceptional, near frenzied alacrity of body and mind, as if spurred on by a flow of creative electrical energy that raised thoughts, gestures, drives, desires and morbid assaults on his consciousness. In rehearsals and at successive performances, he would stride across the stage and shift places, constantly reinvent his character, add new tensions and new features, use a twig in the graveyard scene to pick up the skull of a man who embodied his childhood instead of holding it as all actors do, and moments later invent a puppet show, balancing the said skull on his elbow and dressing it with his own cloak. As others had before, some in the cast felt that Chéreau was so focused on Hamlet that he rehearsed only with Desarthe. Some, like Renucci and Marthe Keller, complained he did not pay enough attention to their characters, and most reviewers agreed with them that the royal couple lacked the ‘devastating sensuality’ one would expect from Chéreau.90 Maybe he was obsessed by the placement of his actors in such a tricky space,

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Renucci thought.91 Marthe Keller committed the error of expecting precise directions and had to beg Desarthe to help her with her part. Gertrude found new energy in the revival when performed by Nada Strancar. On the opening night in Lyon, Chéreau, who was away, sent Nada a telegram commending to her care ‘this poor Gertrude we need to love regardless’, and she found the tip a tremendous help.92 ‘Lightness, vulnerability do not interest him’, says Marianne Denicourt, former pupil of the Amandiers school, who played Ophelia. ‘What he wants is strength, stamina, resistance.’93 Chéreau did not like uppity actors either, and brutally crushed Claude Evrard’s vain attempts to lighten the atmosphere by telling jokes. Having been brought in to replace Bernard Ballet in the part of Polonius, Evrard was soon reduced to a nervous wreck, unable to give what was expected: Chéreau found him too slow, and thought his acting style smacked of the ‘boulevard’, the French term for low-brow theatre of entertainment. Ophelia’s black veil was a last-minute thought, lifted from Kozintsev’s Hamlet. On the eve of the Avignon first night, Chéreau watched a screening of the film and borrowed the Ghost’s floating cloak to drape it around her madness. The veil, four square yards of muslin caught by the wind, was to act as her enemy, impeding her walk and outlining her despair. References to the cinema apart, plus innumerable ones to painting, Chéreau’s Hamlet was overtly, emphatically theatrical. Peduzzi’s ‘fallen giant’ of a set played its own active part in the plot, springing traps under the character’s feet, hiding or revealing secrets, spitting out corpses, every step of the ground a treacherous pitfall. Hamlet’s feigned madness served to hide his very real fit of depression after the crushing visit of the Ghost; it obeyed ‘the subtle dialectics so typical of Shakespeare, between truth and lies, between reality and theatre’.94 Some of the actors may have lacked individual attention, yet Chéreau’s notes show how precisely he catered to each and every character’s mood in situ. In the first court scene, Claudius, who is fresh on the job, makes decisions as they come. Thus he

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allows Laertes to leave before he is aware he will have to refuse Hamlet’s similar request, and makes the Queen his accomplice, though hers is the guiding strength, with the polite manners of the mighty. The whole first act must be ‘rapid, agitated, convulsed’. The Ghost too is tense, with so little time at his disposal, unable to find rest until he has seen his son. The Counsel of the new-made king is as itchy, as are the guards, the court scene as frenzied as the horse’s tempo, Polonius barely restraining his violent impulses. The moment Laertes walks out, the royal party shows signs of coming apart. So does Polonius’s family, who first appear as united and chaste, when Laertes and Ophelia warn each other against the fires of desire, until he imposes a policeman’s rule of fear and deep corruption. Mad Ophelia does not carry flowers, nor must she appear ‘charmante’. Everybody stands in fear of the deranged Hamlet, while he, an ‘unaccomplished coward’, vents his temper on the women each time he fails to act. He runs to the front and hurls ‘To be or not to be’ at the audience, taking everyone on and off stage by surprise. He must reach towards madness, come close enough to risk a fall, as on the edge of Lear’s cliff, ‘play – or be – mad from 2.2 to 4.3’, but he is far from mad when he unmasks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in two ticks. His speech when he finds Claudius at prayer is his most confused and incoherent one, punctuated with marginal fermata. He had never wasted a look on Horatio before; now at 3.2 he calls him back, the only time he does call him, when he realizes the young man is his only true friend. Fortinbras, ‘an active diplomat’, shows who is master by cutting Horatio and speaking his last lines himself. Chéreau’s ensemble work was as impressive as ever. The apparent chaos was minutely choreographed, the positions on stage indicated with arrows in marginal sketches on the typescripts, the ‘Pyrrhus speech’ divided between the company of actors, G clefs in red ink marking sounds and musical punctuations, extracts of Prince, Zappa, bagpipes. The pantomime needed close attention, as the only moment when the whole sequence is played out: Claudius does not recognize

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himself, and Chéreau has a note of praise here for ‘the genius of putting on a dumb show which no one on stage understands but which is perfectly clear to the audience.’95 Each character from the humblest to the leading parts, including the extras, must burn with an interior flame.96 Vincent and Bonnaffé, Ruf and van Hove; all directors admire his choral management of crowds. Perhaps the most intuitive description and his method can be left to Jean Jourdheuil, who compares it to the strategy of Michel Platini, the football player, ‘his actors posted like troops of French riflemen, with enough elbow room between them to allow occasional moments of “personal game” ’. What else remains to be invented in the art of staging? he rhetorically asks. ‘Perhaps a paradox of strategy, a kind of football where one would be required to score an own goal against one’s camp.’97

5 Contemporary Writing at Les Amandiers

During rehearsals of The Winter’s Tale and Hamlet, Chéreau was interviewed by his former guide to Shakespeare’s histories, the German theatre critic André Müller. Far more candid than any he ever gave to French journalists, the interview covers Chéreau’s artistic and political stance on the eve of his Hamlet.1 His interviewer is too probing, he complains, yet he answers with devastating honesty, owning to a recurrent disgust with himself, dislike of much of his work, dire loneliness since childhood, and feelings of guilt. At experiencing pleasure, perhaps? Yes, among other causes. ‘I don’t have much sympathy for myself, hate to watch myself in a mirror.’ When a French newspaper revealed his homosexuality, which he himself never discussed, it was a shock to see it printed in black and white. He does not mind its being made public, but resents the fact that it puts him in a category, and lends critics a facile key to the understanding of his work. Thus, Ivan Nagel has used it as an argument in his review of Lulu, which was utter nonsense.2 Chéreau never wanted to direct Carmen, not because he is gay, but because he finds the story idiotic and dislikes the music. Does he suffer from the fact that artists have so little influence in politics? the interviewer goes on. No, he is not so pessimistic, not on this specific point, art does move lines, even if marginally. But one can no longer say nor believe that

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communism is the only truth, as the Left claimed before 1968, when Cuba was all the rage. The year 1968 marked the turning point when he began to feel that such representations (Vorstellungen) were impossible, that no country or party owned the political truth. He regrets having sometimes expressed indignation when he was not truly indignant. He has signed too many manifestoes, including one against the repression of Czech dissenters, which said ‘We artists make you laugh, you tyrants’: he had not written it himself; those were Ariane Mnouchkine’s words, pathos typical of her manner. When asked to develop, he lets himself go in a detailed criticism of Mnouchkine’s work, beginning with her so-called ‘collective creation’, her simplistic answers to every complex problem, her actors who are only able to shout and plant nails in woodboards. He tried to work with them but found it impossible. She believes artless, naked truth is enough to deliver a message, and reduces her characters to caricatures. Everybody else considers her the best theatre artist in France, and prefers her to him, even her political statements. Yet her treatment of Klaus Mann’s novel in Mephisto was reductive. Does Chéreau condemn people like Gustav Gründgens, Richard Strauss or Gerhardt Hauptmann, who collaborated with the Nazi regime? He can only speak about France, does not know how he himself would have behaved, hopes he would never have been on the side of collaborators. No one has a duty to become a resistant, but one should at least stay away, which was more easily done in France than in Germany. Louis Jouvet never spoke a word against the German occupants, but he never sullied his hands; he just left. There is a moral frontier before which an artist must say no: in any political system, he will be required to take sides, because the State, any State, needs artists. Here Müller reminds Chéreau he defined Siegfried as ‘a precursor of Fascism, one always ready to forget; in short, a criminal.’ Yet didn’t Nietzsche say amnesia was a necessary condition of survival? Isn’t someone who refuses to forget morally right but unable to act? Still, Chéreau maintains, there are things that should never be forgotten, the murder of

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Allende, for instance, and Pinochet’s take-over: he had wept at the news, and still did. No artist should ever accept an official position under a dictatorship. Every artist needs to know, and say, where he stands.

Between life and death Who is his favourite writer? the interviewer asks. The only living authors he appreciates are Koltès and Heiner Müller. Is he a moralist? Yes, maybe. Not like Genet, then? There are many other differences between them, one being Genet’s enjoyment of doing harm, which he never shared. Actually, his meeting with these three authors greatly contributed to his artistic mutation, Benhamou observes: all three share a common pursuit, ‘obstinately deconstruct the theatre, summon the void’, which will thoroughly alter his treatment of images. Instead of being figured on stage, reality confronts and endangers the power of the theatre, bringing it to the edge of the chasm: ‘Representation will no longer exalt the image without effecting its erasure, or even its sacrifice.’3 A sacrifice he had practised by refusing to have the Walhala on fire at the conclusion of the Ring. Just when other directors grew disenchanted with alternative fragmented spaces and returned to the conventional stage, the Nanterre years saw him leave the Italian illusionist box, and concentrate on the realism of scenic elements in a wholly artificial setting, to show the theatre erasing itself.4 Chéreau’s direction of Heiner Müller’s Quartett, drawn from one of his favourite novels, Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, took him back to the lethal pleasures of pre-revolutionary France.5 Brilliantly performed by Michelle Marquais and Roland Bertin, who play the two survivors of the quartet after the elimination of their victims, it concluded the trilogy dedicated to the eighteenth century, after Mozart’s opera and Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivante. The gigantic set of Lucio Silla, a classical façade with movable columns, reinterpreted the past, like those walls evocative of Ancient

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Rome that Peruzzi had designed for La Dispute. It served for the other two plays, and laid down open traps under Hamlet’s feet. A year after Quartett, Robert Wilson’s production of Hamletmachine introduced the Shakespeare season at Les Amandiers. Another contemporary author Chéreau admired and worked with but does not quote in this interview was Hervé Guibert, disciple of Foucault, novelist and photographer, who like Koltès died of AIDS . Both would be evoked by Chéreau in Yves Jeuland’s documentary Bleu, blanc, rose. His last public performance was his reading of Pierre Guyotat’s autobiographic Coma, in which the writer exposes his physical and mental condition.6 Despite Chéreau’s assertion to André Müller that he refuses to specialize in gay stories, several of his films, from L’Homme blessé (1983) to Son frère (2003), deal with the theme, focusing on the squalors and miseries of ‘la drague’ (out on the pull), showing wasted bodies torn by desire, or disease, that drew homophobic reactions from some reviewers.7 The discovery of homosexuality came at the time of Les Soldats,8 and for years he thought of it as ‘a curse’, but no longer did, he confided with a beaming smile during one of the Louvre encounters. Since childhood, he had felt life itself to be a curse, he said when he privately confessed his sexual inclination to Jean-Pierre Vincent and his wife Hélène who had never guessed it through their years of working, camping and rough living together. He had a strong dislike for the homosexual lobby and demonstrative show-offs, never carried his homosexuality lightly, never made a decisive coming out. Even when it became generally known, he refused to have it discussed, or to make it a fighting theme in his productions, an attitude often criticized by gay militants.9 It also created misunderstandings with young actors who wanted to be valued for their acting talent and found themselves objects of fierce desire. His nearest approximation to a public statement was made late in life, when he read two of Shakespeare’s sonnets, ‘the master mistress of my passion’ and ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ on the Odéon stage in March 2013.

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An important part of the Amandiers’ golden legend was the daily presence of writers who freely mixed with the actors and students. There were ‘two magnificent encounters’, his Nanterre administrator Catherine Tasca recalls: Koltès, ‘a luminous presence in the house’, and Genet, a discreet but sympathetic visitor, whose plays opened Les Amandiers, followed by other living authors, Heiner Müller and Hervé Guibert. After their Ring, Pierre Boulez, originally Tasca’s first employer, approached the same authors with plans to compose an opera: he made successive contacts for a libretto with Genet, Koltès, and with Heiner Müller, but each attempt was still-born, ‘each time death interfered with this project’, and he finally gave up.10 Quartett ends with a sentence that Chéreau found hard to bear: ‘Now we are alone, cancer my love.’

Genet’s faded screens This potent mix of creative and destructive energies would be the hallmark of the new establishment. Chéreau was fascinated by the discovery of new texts, works that were not yet ‘dry’ as his father used to say. After the lofty adventures of Peer Gynt and the Ring, his first gesture was to abandon the classics and break the traditional proscenium arch, invent a new theatrical space for two contemporary plays. The first season opened with Combat de nègre et de chiens by an unknown young playwright and Les Paravents by a most notorious one. In one blow, he renounced ‘the oniric power of the Italian box’, and the splendid nostalgia of a Western culture he had worked so hard to renovate, as if by this major sacrifice, Benhamou believes, he aimed ‘to kill the happy magic of the Italian stage and its capacity of figuration – to tear away his director’s gesture from its early innocent impulse, from any acquired knowhow’.11 Jean Genet’s Journal du voleur, described by Sartre as not just an autobiography but a ‘sacred cosmogony’, had inspired in part the screenplay of L’Homme blessé.12 During the

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rehearsals of Les Paravents Genet gave Chéreau a notebook filled with his comments on the play, just as he had written to Roger Blin at the time of its creation,13 when Genet’s criminal record, the political context, and the fact that this ‘obscene’ piece of work was performed in a subsidized theatre had combined to create a major scandal.14 A group of MP s demanded that the funding of the Odéon be stopped, but the then Minister of Culture, André Malraux, stood firm: ‘Liberty, ladies and gentlemen, does not always have clean hands; but even when it doesn’t, one should consider twice before throwing it out of the window’.15 This famous satire of colonialism, written at the onset of the Algerian War, in which Genet foretold the victory of the rebellion, opened the first Amandiers season. The war was now over, but its wounds and aftermath were far from healed. There was much talk of the tortures practised during the war, but none on what was happening now in France. From the start, Chéreau decided to take the play out of Algeria, and focus on the present situation of immigrants. He and Peduzzi searched photographs of old cabarets, music halls, went to visit various derelict places, until they happened on the remains of the Louxor cinema in Barbès, at the centre of La Goutte d’Or, a multi-ethnic area of Paris officially diagnosed as a Zone Urbaine Sensible, i.e. famed for street-robbery, drug dealing, contraband and prostitution. Instead of the backstage they had in mind, or a ‘cage de théâtre’, they chose to recreate a seedy 1950s cinema where North African immigrants tell former settlers the story of how Europeans lost their power in the colonies. The space they structured wholly ignored Genet’s stage directions which they thought belonged to obsolete theatrical codes: ‘We did it not with respect, but with love.’16 Half of the action took place in the auditorium, amid the rows of seats or in the alleyways. As in Elizabethan dramaturgy, none of the areas kept a permanent identity; each spelt out theatrical transience, each actor must create and define the kind of space he temporarily inhabited, using only minimal props. The colonial settlers who sat in the stalls at the beginning were progressively

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expelled from their seats and wandered around the auditorium in search of a safe haven, till driven against a wall, reviving the history of their dispossession. Spectators who chose to sit where they expected to get a good central view of the play were utterly disoriented when actors began to move around or behind them. The scenes started at the top of the auditorium and rolled down towards the tiny platform used by the Arabs to tell their story. The performance generally reoriented the text away from visual towards oral communication. Nothing was projected on the large screen – sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque – at the back of the stage. Half-raised at Scene Eight to reveal part of the world of the dead, it was lifted completely at Scene Fifteen when the whole platform became the antechamber of death. The screens on which Genet’s characters draw rebellious graffiti no longer served their initial function: the actors tore apart small screens of the same translucent material when they passed through the mirror into the dead zone.17 Genet was no longer happy with his play and kept on suggesting they make substantial cuts. The work of reducing it to manageable size was entrusted to Regnault and Stratz. They studied the original text of 1961, the variants introduced at the premiere in 1966, and Genet’s revised version of 1976. The Nanterre text borrowed from all three, while shortening them noticeably. In the uproar surrounding the creation, many features of the play had been lost, Aslan points out in her close study of Chéreau’s production: for instance, the affinities of Genet’s language with dialectal Arabic, his references to Maghrebin customs and Mediterranean litanies of insults.18 Chéreau kept the seventeen scenes of the original design, but reduced the hundred or so characters to forty, stripped them of their ritualizing lyricism, shaped them into grotesques, and ignored most of Genet’s aesthetic requirements. Yet he did interpret the writer’s more profound themes: the joyful massacre of a decaying imperialist society, its intimate wounds covered by clowning, ferocious derision, carnivalesque scatology. A carnival that made havoc of our traditional history and values, including the theatre. ‘The moment he borders on

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the sublime, Genet tacks away into sarcasm. Chéreau made it stand out clearly’, notes Didier Sandre, who played the Lieutenant.19 Algeria is never named in the text. To Regnault, ‘Les Paravents is a comedy about France, and it is the duty of the French theatre, when it is truly great, to speak of France on behalf of the other.’20 Genet did not want Arabic actors and had only accepted a Moroccan one, Amidou, to play the part of Saïd for Blin. Again, Chéreau took the opposite direction, cast several Algerians, and chose multi-ethnic diversity. The role of Ommou was given to Keltoum, the first actress to take off her veil to go on stage in Algeria. The other women were Berberian, Brazilian, Russian or Arminian. Maria Casarès, who had created the part of the Mother for Blin, performed it again, keeping to her impeccable diction and distinctive vibrato, ‘Saiiiiiiid. Tu ne vas pas flaaaancher!’ Didier Sandre found the universe of the play a ‘dark, dangerous, visceral’ place they had to go through in order to perform it, and did not know at first how to handle his part without the sacred ritual Chéreau was bent on destroying. He had difficulty reconciling the image of a glamorous, smartly-dressed officer in the text with his shabby uniform and behaviour, until he pictured this Lieutenant as a tragic figure, haunted by nostalgic visions of a parading army entirely at odds with the dirty war he found himself unable to fight.21 As for Chéreau, he felt no obligation to explain everything in this enigmatic play: ‘The problem was not to elucidate. We had to understand by other very secret ways. When we failed to understand, it meant we did not want to go in search of the terrifying thing that the play narrates, or that one needs to upset within oneself to understand.’22

Koltès on the road In the epigraph of Le Retour au désert, the last of his plays he would see performed, Koltès quotes lines from Richard III that sound like his own dirge:

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Why grow the branches now the root is withered? Why wither not the leaves that want their sap? Combat de nègre et de chiens arrived by post in 1979, with a recommendation from Hubert Gignoux. The young, nearunknown playwright, Bernard-Marie Koltès, had seen La Dispute six times and decided he wanted Chéreau to direct his plays. Chéreau was struck by the quality of the writing, certain he had found one of the century’s great writers, on a par with Conrad or Faulkner.23 Still, he had just decided to put on Peer Gynt, so the play had to wait another four years. Combat de nègre et de chiens, translated as Come Dog, Come Night, had its world premiere in New York where Françoise Kourilsky acted as ambassador of French dramatic writing, before the select audience of La Mamma, in December 1982. The following March, Chéreau’s production made the opening of Les Amandiers. Chéreau was fascinated by the strangeness of Koltès’s universe, wholly alien to his own, as well as unsettled and scared by the radical marginality he depicts. They had common literary roots – Marivaux, Shakespeare, Chekhov – but to Chéreau, Koltès represented the world of today, throwing together people who should never have met and inventing unusual modes of exchange. He seemed the answer to one of Chéreau’s dreams: making a new playwright known to an audience seemed to justify his fey employment as a mediator. Peduzzi’s set for Combat de nègre was a motorway, a stage object at the junction of cinema and theatre, which marked Chéreau’s decisive break with the Italian box. The play, located in an enclosed and guarded worksite somewhere in francophone West Africa, ‘is not about Africa or Black people’, Koltès insists; ‘it does not feature neocolonialism nor racial issues’, it does not express an opinion, but just evokes ‘a place in the world’, as sometimes one sees places that are ‘sorts of metaphors of life, or one aspect of life’, as in Conrad, ‘the rivers climbing up through the jungle’.24 It features a series of dual confrontations, in most of which only one protagonist speaks, each punctuated by the sound of barking dogs. Two worlds

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‘discuss as if above the edge of a precipice, the narrative point of view always on the same side, the white men’s’. In their Babelian confusion, alcohol, gambling, selling and buying, competing, all offer substitute modes of exchange. Lyrical soliloquies alternate with brutally crude verbal jousts and comic asides. Shakespeare was summoned for ‘the brutality, the proliferation’ of his language, Marivaux for his ‘literary rigour, his punctuation’.25 The two white men express opposite ways of conquering an alien culture. The third white character, a sort of ‘Woman who rode away’ into a fantasized Africa, vainly hopes to conjure chaos by fusing both continents in her own body, and ends expelled from both. The black man, Alboury, who comes to claim the corpse of his murdered brother, is named after a Wolof king who fought for African independence in the nineteenth century. His confrontation with the first dog echoes Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’. At the end, stability is restored at the price of a ritual human sacrifice.26 The jolt on young audiences was tremendous. The director, Pauline Bureau, and writer Laurent Mauvignier impute a great deal to their first contact with Koltès – she the will to work in the theatre, he the will to write. As for Chéreau, Combat de nègre gave a new necessity to his work as director, and he felt guilty at having delayed so long. It was also a new experience, an unsettling one, to have the author standing at his back while he was discussing the play for the benefit of his cast. Koltès attended some of the rehearsals, and never criticized or commented unless questioned, when he would explain the scene in a way opposite to what they had just done.27 There followed a short success story with its ups and downs. Chéreau’s desire to serve an author whose highly personal idiom he admired rather backfired when, eager to do him proud, he staged Quai Ouest in the grand auditorium of Les Amandiers with star actors, and weighed it down with luxurious sets that made even loyal friends wonder at such expenses and such waste. He realized it took time to make an audience familiar with a new writer; the large auditorium was a mistake, the play needed more intimacy and smaller means.

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But the resulting flop did not alter his determination one jot: he would produce Koltès’s next work, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, without pausing. At that point he vowed to put on every play as soon as it was completed, even though he did not fully understand them, and enjoy the rare pleasure of casting Le Retour au désert while it was still being written. At the revival of Solitude, his interpretation of the Dealer’s part was unanimously hailed as masterly, but Koltès greatly resented the fact that he had disregarded his direction to have a black man play the Dealer. Their relationship further soured after various misunderstandings over the playwright’s texts. Chéreau felt they were turning into a Chekhov/Stanislavsky duet, when Koltès angrily criticized his design for Le Retour.28 Chekhov was furious at the misinterpretation of his Cherry Orchard which he had meant as a comedy. Koltès felt likewise that Chéreau often missed the humour in his writing unless it was openly funny but, Chéreau pleaded, it is difficult to treat a play no one has ever heard yet with a light and comic touch. Some of the complaints were petty. Koltès was impressed by the star status of their leading actress, Jacqueline Maillan. He had written the play specifically for her and now he demanded that she be properly lit, since the public came to see her. Chéreau found her irritating beyond belief: she would do marvels in rehearsals under his guidance, then step back into her boulevard persona when standing in front of the audience. And though he obliged with lamps and doilies, he hated the bourgeois trappings Koltès required for his set, as if he must bring Rimbaud back to stuffy Charleville to please the Metz native. What Koltès wanted most at that point was to emancipate himself, have other directors stage his plays. He had already let Vitez know via Regnault that he was welcome to them. Now he wanted Peter Stein to direct the one he was writing. It reached the Schaubühne after his death, sent anonymously and labelled ‘Zucco, for Stein’, in Koltès’s handwriting, and was created there the following year. His plays did find a new life away from Chéreau, performed now around the world, translated into some thirty languages. They caused new conflicts in 2007,

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when the Comédie-Française received an injunction to stop performing Le Retour: François Koltès was suing the director, Muriel Mayette, because she had cast a European actor in the part of Aziz, the Arab, against his brother’s stated preference, but he lost his suit, and the show went on.29 After leaving Nanterre, Chéreau returned only intermittently to the theatre: for Botho Strauss’s Le Temps et la Chambre (1991), for a stunning revival of Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1995) with himself again the Dealer facing the Client Pascal Greggory,30 at the Manufacture des Œillets, where he also staged Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments) with the Conservatoire students (1998), then inaugurated the Odéon’s Ateliers Berthier with Phèdre (2003). In the gaps, there were occasional readings, of Koltès, Guibert, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. When invited by Peduzzi to give a series of readings at Villa Medicis in 2005, he chose an extract from The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Le Grand Inquisiteur’. Les Visages et les Corps, performed with Philippe Calvario, was drawn from the diary he kept while preparing his ambitious multi-artistic project in answer to the invitation of the Louvre.31 He was in a period of experimentation when he met the dancer Thierry Thieû Niang, who worked with prisoners, seniors and autistic children, thus drawing him to a fresh approach and lending a more humane outlook to his concentration on the body. He was also in search of new authors. It was Thieû Niang who made him read Marguerite Duras, not quite one of Chéreau’s ‘family’ so far, and who ‘choreographed’ his public readings of La Douleur with Dominique Blanc, as well as Guyotat’s story of his psychiatric internment, Coma.32 Together they sought to find a common mode of expression, to reach a performance of the gesture that, in Thieû Niang’s view, ‘being the most organic, would be the most poetic’. Together they co-directed two plays, Rêve d’automne and I am the Wind, authored by Jon Fosse, his last living author.33 The Odéon’s memorial tribute to Chéreau was staged by Thieû Niang in a softly lit public library with texts portraying him read by some of his favourite actors.34

6 Teaching and Educating

‘Koltès and the school of actors directed by Pierre Romans – that was one of the most important times of my life. A Golden Age.’1 The invisible part of the Nanterre establishment was to be dedicated to research, around a school and a cinema studio. The focal point of this research was the question that kept returning since the days of Sartrouville, on the powers of the theatre, its place in society, its ability to deal with today’s anxieties and tensions. Chéreau felt a growing dissatisfaction with a theatre unable to account for today’s world, even if it received loud cheers from audiences. After the relative failure of the Sartrouville experience he was increasingly dubious of its powers. The meeting with Koltès temporarily assuaged some of his doubts about his own role in it, if he could bring an unknown author to the attention of the public, as Jouvet did for Giraudoux, Stanislavsky for Chekhov. It was ‘important junk’, ‘the foam and froth of life’,2 yet neither he nor Koltès thought it natural and obvious to write or to stage plays when so many other media competed with the theatre. Was is still necessary? Was it worth the effort? What was it that could be said only through the theatre as through no other medium?3

A house of one’s own The plan was to have young people inhabit the place and share in all its activities, meet writers and artists, practise with

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seasoned actors, study with academics, technicians, foreign directors and film makers. Peduzzi even hoped at one point to create another school next to the actors’, where they would be taught the history of design, styles, orders of architecture, and learn to make sets, but this part of the project did not materialize. Apart from the actual tuition, the students were indeed present everywhere, to watch rehearsals, play mute parts, serve in the cafeteria or as ushers, attend lectures, and eventually perform on stage or screen, or direct a production. Professionals were invited to their performances, and at the end of their training, they were each given a press book of their own with studio photographs. At the opening, the management had received a thousand applications, auditioned several hundred, and selected twenty-four. In the second and last class, nineteen were chosen out of 2,300 candidates. A large proportion of these select students made successful careers on stage and screen, but the sudden death of Pierre Romans at age 40 put an end to the experiment.4 Looking back on their achievement, Chéreau thought it was a half success, because the school failed to teach them a trade and its techniques. Not wanting to behave like teachers, they treated the students as professionals instead of pupils. With hindsight, he thought that those who proved good actors were already good when they arrived.5 This unusual school was to be a permanent workshop. Chéreau and Romans had designed it as a young company within the house, developing a separate programme, studying complete plays rather than the short scenes of traditional tuition, and performing them before a chosen audience. The first class had to wait nearly a year before Chéreau began work with them on Shakespeare’s comedies, in November 1983.6 The second one made the cast of his film Hôtel de France, a very free adaptation of Platonov, transported to a different country, in Anjou near Chéreau’s birthplace, a different century, under different names.7 A few months later they performed Platonov on stage, after rehearsing in the Chartreuse near Avignon, Chéreau’s way of ‘taming’ the place before facing the

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Cour d’honneur.8 The following year, 1988, the class, now young professionals, were all over Avignon, cast in Hamlet, Le Conte d’hiver, and the Chekhovian Chroniques d’une fin d’après-midi. Writing shortly after Chéreau’s death, Marc Citti, who played Bernardo, Osric and Florizel, plus a few extras in group scenes, recalled those intoxicating two years during which they had ‘learnt to learn’. As Bernardo, the 19-year-old was to enter and speak the first line of Hamlet, ‘Who’s there?’, but before he walked the stage he had to practise avoiding the hooves of Buffalo on the parking lot, and learn to master his fear.9 Since the days of Richard II, Shakespeare had offered Chéreau ‘a privileged laboratory of research into his relation to actors’, Treilhou-Balaudé notes, an experience begun with his own performance of the title part under Daniel Emilfork’s coaching.10 On the two occasions he was required to transmit the core of his stage work to new generations, he chose Shakespeare. Emilfork never told him what he wanted, but spoke to his imagination. What he asked from the young actor, which Chéreau only understood and applied much later, was to place an emotion or a private image under each word.11 A fascinating pedagogue, Emilfork ‘encouraged me to dream, advance towards unknown regions, word after word; I drank all of it.’ He was ‘Stanislavsky through and through. The experiment was repeated with Toller. He held the secret of the theatre. I asked him to teach at les Amandiers.’12 Pierre Romans wanted to bring out the actors that those students held in them.13 The restaurant and bookshop, complete novelties at the time, enabled them to concentrate on their work. They had to attend dancing and singing classes, not because he wanted them to emulate the American style of actors but because they were seriously lacking in musical culture, he felt, despite the decibels constantly poured in their ears. To grow attuned to more complex rhythms, and learn to find their own, they were introduced to a large spectrum that ran ‘from Gregorian song to Xenakis’.14 They also had voice and breathing exercises, read and rehearsed with experienced practitioners,

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performed before a camera, attended lectures by professors from the nearby Nanterre University, including Jean Jourdheuil, and had the privileges of a full student’s statute. Among their teachers were the renowned actress and coach Madeleine Marion, who led them through the intricacies of the Racinian emotions, Didier Sandre and Jean-Hugues Anglade. An exchange was organized with the O’Neill Theater Center of Waterford where the first class spent six weeks doing three hours daily of physical exercises, African, jazz and tap dancing, mime, rehearsed scenes from American playwrights and from musicals. There they learnt the true meaning of ‘discipline’, ‘responsibility’. There Agnès Jaoui nurtured a taste for the musical that she would cultivate later in Alain Resnais’ films.15 The first class suffered the growing pains of the school before their designers’ plans properly matured. Christine Vézinet had worked with Vitez and Mesguich, but it was with Chéreau she learnt most, although the atmosphere was not exactly girl-friendly. He lacked humanity, she felt, but his teaching and his direction of actors suited her: where he found an answering commitment, he gave generously. They had excellent teachers: kind Denise Perron who among other exercises made them wiggle their toes in cold water; rough Daniel Emilfork, who complained he was throwing pearls to swine. They were also given plenty of excellent food, drank far too much, took drugs, mixed with their elders at the cafeteria, and worked strenuously. The atmosphere was generally cheerful, though some of her co-students, mostly girls, had a tough time, being judged inadequate, unlearnt and unattractive. Several left at the end of the first term. Those who stayed performed scenes from Goldoni, Chekhov and Wedekind before a small audience of professionals at the end of their first year. They made a film, L’Atelier, with André Téchiné, and at the close of their teaching period played four comedies of Shakespeare directed by Chéreau. The second group, selected with greater care, were generally more mature, and got a far better deal. They made films with Doillon and Chéreau, toured France with performances of Kleist and Chekhov under

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Romans’ direction, and went to Berlin.16 Seven of the nineteen would be cast in Chéreau’s Hamlet.17

Sad hearts – Shakespeare’s comedies The school, Romans’ idea in the first place, benefitted from Chéreau’s involvement, a major attraction to hopeful ambitious students. Though reluctant at first, he took up the challenge, and agreed to confront himself with what Boulez called ‘the mirror of inexperience’. He had never had masters apart from those he chose for himself. It was his first experiment in working with performers twenty years younger than himself. Romans, aged 32, bridged the generation gap. With them Chéreau used a method he had never practised before. They would immerse themselves in Shakespeare, discover together not just one but ‘four strange, enigmatic plays’, find out how his comedies were built, why they seemed more secret than the tragedies. It took several weeks of reading at the table to finalize the casting and to ‘thrash out’ the content of the texts. The aim was to free them from the conventions and preconceived ideas about a part that came first to mind. After this preliminary phase, they played two or three group scenes to get ‘the exact measure of the liberty expected from them’, then had to present the director with the other scenes. What mattered was their own invention, ‘how they translated the dream of the play in terms of space and emotion’.18 Chéreau thought it a healthy exercise for all concerned to make shows in a bare room, and return to the basics of theatre: ‘It is a must for the theatre – not from a vow of poverty – to remain forever able to make a fiction credible with just actors, a few costumes, three chairs and five tables, to suspend disbelief without any further addition.’ Rehearsing Shakespeare’s comedies with this first group of students renewed ‘a pleasure in directing I hadn’t felt for years’. Chekhov required a minimum of naturalism, but Shakespeare could be performed ‘with improvised costumes in a rehearsal room with ceiling lights and a few lamps’.19

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Originally these were to be just school exercises, but months later the students did a second session of work on the comedies, and Much Ado, Love’s Labours Lost, Twelfth Night and As You Like It were presented as ‘Travaux d’élèves’ in the autumn of 1984. Chéreau found those plays ideally suited to his purpose, offering as they did numerous parts for young people, characters who had kept enough connections with adolescence to need little composition from these beginners. And he could think of no dramatist better than Shakespeare, his ‘auteur fétiche’ (cult author), to work on narration, on protagonists who evolve, contradict themselves, and have no reality outside the relations they build with others. The students were to make those relationships credible, direct one another’s work, find their own character. Christine Vézinet enjoyed plenty of elbowroom to invent the part of Feste in Twelfth Night, spoke French and English, sang, made her own costume. Olivier Rabourdin, Duke Frederick in As You Like It, remembers that they were instructed to take each line at its word value, yet never lose the general sweep of the scene: thus, the only point of the wrestling match was to show up Orlando as a potential enemy of the usurper, it must be over in two seconds, and lead to their immediate confrontation. If Oliver says he is pained by his brother, the actor must express real suffering at Orlando’s taunts, traces of some unresolved conflict that will make his change of heart in the forest credible. Claudio is truly wounded by Hero’s alleged betrayal. Before they are tricked into falling in love, Beatrice and Benedick feel what they say, an intense dislike for each other. When work began at the table, the students had already practised by themselves and learnt their parts. Chéreau’s main directions were: keep contradicting your partner, never let yourself be deviated from your trajectory, play up rivalry, seduction, conflict, take the upper hand. With his class, he discussed English history, Shakespeare’s writing, but never told them how to act, never dictated an intonation. Leyris’s words are hard to pronounce, he wrote on the typescript of Twelfth Night. Here, as in the texts of Marcelle Sibon (Much Ado) and

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Jules Supervielle (Love’s Labours Lost, As You Like It), many phrases were retranslated in common parlance for the students’ sake. Together, they dissected each scene, each crux, what was at stake in each confrontation of the characters. They were constantly warned not to fall into psychological clichés, and as constantly led to dive into the emotions of the protagonists. A man who contained multitudes, Chéreau always kept a balance of tensions, a strict demand for both physical, even animal engagement and full mental activity. They were to play in their rehearsal room, use its peculiar volume, pillars, angles, doors, without the support of sets or elaborate costumes. The lighting was provided by ordinary light bulbs, their props just tables and chairs, and a piano that was in the room from the start. The annotated typescript of Much Ado bears numerous instructions to slam the doors, or close them tight. Most of the notes deal with rhythm: faster, slow down, too soon, too late, more breath. Only the first four acts of each play were performed. To Peduzzi, who came in daily to watch them rehearse, those productions were incredibly fresh and strong, akin to Michelangelo’s sketches: not the finished works but the initial masterful draughtman’s gesture. The few journalists invited to the show were less enthusiastic, and Chéreau himself was far from pleased with their performance. To Armelle Héliot, even though the comedies had been selected to show youth and handsome young men to advantage, the keynote was melancholy, reflecting a more sombre undertone of the Nanterre venture, beneath the glamour and the intoxicating energy. The group scenes expressed utter loneliness, emotions prevailed over merriment. The documents concerning this class are scarce. Because they were semi-private, the performances had few reviews, and Chéreau, burdened as he was with so many tasks, left only minimal notes in the margins of his typescripts, compared with those on his earlier productions that recorded his thoughts, queries and progress through the text. Don Juan, the bastard brother, needs to be read by the light of Lear. Twelfth Night is bathed in music. The protagonists of Love’s Labour’s Lost

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must register every textual mark of the anxieties of young love, the torments of desire. ‘Why do I love her?’ one of the men cries desolate, throwing himself on the ground. In Much Ado, where all watch and spy but no one listens to anyone, they must all speak over each other’s lines, all locked up in their narcissistic certainties. The fusion of sexes in the scenes between Orsino and Viola, far more heart-rending than Rosalind and Orlando’s, show an amazing progress towards the heights of desire. Even Malvolio (Rabourdin) is in love, even before he has found the fake letter: when he reads it, he rushes to put on yellow stockings without a moment’s thought. A strange document found its way to the IMEC archive: the annotated typescript of Solenn Jarniou who played Celia in As You Like It. The dutiful student copied several scenes entirely by hand, perhaps to memorize them, since Chéreau notoriously had little patience with actors who forgot their lines. Her numerous notes bear fascinating traces of the rehearsal process, especially on the nature of her character: ‘Suffer more. Fight more. Never fear to play out of tune. Never wait to be assured of a feeling before speaking. Be acerb. Fight. Nothing is ever won. Struggle more. Be upset by the others’ feelings.’ Celia’s levity must always be at the price of an effort, every cue a new hill to climb. She and her cousin were inseparable, but this special love affair has come to an end; she must perform the painful shock caused to her. The name Aliena means foreign, alien, but also alienated, enslaved; she is Rosalind’s toy. At 2.4, Celia’s exhaustion is translated into student language: ‘Shit! I too have good reason to feel tired. Anyway, I’m not budging from here.’ A while later, she writes down her director’s irritated rebuttal: ‘Why the hell should I know if you don’t? All you have to do is follow the lines instead of asking me silly questions.’ Or her own: ‘Fuck you. Some evenings I’m just fed up with this job. I’m fed up.’ Visibly, Chéreau never loses sight of her character, and provides her with a side story when she has no lines to speak. At Corin’s entrance, she ‘must stand up quickly, am half naked. Intrusion. Hurry getting dressed and

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collect my things. Leave last.’ When Orlando declares that ‘My Rosalind is virtuous’, she must wink to her cousin to let her know she is on her side.20 As in Chéreau’s own typescripts, the margins abound in brief directions: ‘Earlier. Faster. Stronger. Quick!!! Happier. Watch. Step forward. Machine gun. Accelerate. Breathe. Control hatred. Rage. C more violent against R. Too easy. Too dry. Improvise more.’21 The wish to stage the full play with an excellent cast of actors would have to wait. The only one of his class to perform in Hamlet, Rabourdin would not hear again from Chéreau for twenty-five years, then receive a phone call offering him the part of Oliver in the director’s last project.

Fights to the death – Henry VI/ Richard III (Fragments) Chéreau again chose Shakespeare when he returned to teaching in 1998, with a large group of third-year students at Conservatoire national d’art dramatique, the gateway to Comédie-Française. His long desire to stage Shakespeare’s arch-villain Gloucester had been uncannily encouraged just months before: at Giorgio Strehler’s funeral a mourner threw a handful of little papers bearing names of his productions, Chéreau told Valérie Six, and the one he caught said, ‘Richard III’. He chose extracts from the first Henriad, the conflict between York and Lancaster leading to Richard’s conquest of power, and stopped after his mother’s curse. They performed Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments) for the Festival d’Automne, at the Manufacture des Œillets, a former industrial plant where he had revived Dans la solitude des champs de coton three years earlier. The only sets were provided by the architecture of the building. Having the students play in an empty space was but a further development in Chéreau’s search for the essence of the theatre, after the concentration of Solitude based around two protagonists on the naked road of a naked stage.

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Fragments was presented as a piece of experimental research. Instead of analysing the plays as in the earlier Elizabethan productions, the programme leaflet concentrated on bare facts, illustrated with extracts of Machiavelli, and of Whitman’s ‘Song of the Broad-Axe’.22 The Plantagenets were summed up as a ‘genealogical jungle’ framed by two rose bushes, bloodied by atrocious acts of hatred between the two clans. Four contributors to Shakespeare’s text were announced: Armand Guibert and Pierre Leyris, who respectively translated Henry VI and Richard III for Club Français du Livre, plus JeanMichel Déprats and Daniel Loayza. Déprats never attended rehearsals, but passages from his translation of Richard III for Lavaudant were used in the final patchwork.23 Loayza, lent by the Odéon to act as literary advisor and textual guide, was asked to simplify, shorten, modernize Guibert’s and Leyris’s language, straighten up their convoluted syntax, and he ended up retranslating parts of Richard III.24 Chéreau’s aim in using a variety of translations rather than stick to one, Loayza believes, was to have a free hand with the text and dilute responsibilities, avoid conflicts as well as problems of copyright. The cast, some thirty young, energetic, inexperienced, largely unread future actors, had difficulty understanding the words of the text and making them understood when they spoke their lines. They were totally ignorant of Shakespeare, and had to be told the story. Discussing the experiment years later while he was preparing Phèdre, Chéreau confessed that because he found the students’ abilities mediocre, he had made them all act ‘forcefully’, something that would be unsuitable for Racine, though Shakespeare could bear it. Apart from Queen Margaret (Céline Carrère), he had not chosen them as he would have in a professional production, yet made sure the selection would include several possible candidates for Richard III , a ‘universal’ character who must be irresistibly seductive.25 He was seriously irked by the students’ lack of culture, and lack of interest when the work at the table began: ‘I can see reading is not your favourite sport. Is there no longer a library at the Conservatoire?’ he would ask. ‘Don’t you ever go there?’

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He insisted that they must not just know the words, but the thoughts under them. Years later, when moving flats, he donated his own books to the school’s library. While the plot was anatomized, Chéreau gave rapid indications on the parts and the dramatic situation. In reading after reading he put in touches of colour, nuances, listened to their voices, got a sense of their personalities. Loayza’s task was to sketch the background, the Wars of the Roses, Edward’s long reign, Richard’s short one, develop Machiavelli’s point on the conflict between conquering and keeping power, explain that Richard was a historical character but his dramatic persona was not, clarify the meaning of words like ‘alacrity’ or ‘dubbing’ that were unclear to the budding actors. He was not meant to interfere with the dramaturgy. The consultant’s role, he felt, was that of a toolbox, to be opened when specific points needed clarification or building material. Chéreau liked reading; he also liked having people at hand to read the books that did not tempt his appetite. After barely a week at the table, he gave up hope of stimulating the students’ curiosity – tempting their appetite with books and stories – and made them stand on the set, and stuck pictures of paintings and films on the walls where they remained till the end of the rehearsals, mostly scenes of massacres or distorted faces. A filmed document of the rehearsals offers valuable insights, not just into the subtleties of Chéreau’s work with the actors, but the inner workings of his mind.26 If not a key to his heart, it provides some hints on his lasting attraction to Shakespeare. The five lessons concentrate on preparatory work, group scene, soliloquy, women’s chorus, and the students’ feedback. Chéreau had long wished to direct Richard III, perhaps ever since watching Planchon’s production with Michel Auclair in the title part, and since his own early contacts with the play via Brecht’s Arturo Ui, the rise of Hitler seen through a Shakespearean lens. He thought he could have played the role himself, like Al Pacino in Looking for Richard, and he actually does when he shows his actor how to move in Metge’s captation. The scene of the wailing queens, to him perhaps the

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most important in the play, was one of the extracts he had inserted in Prix de la révolte. The queens of Fragments were modelled on Planchon’s, crouching and holding hands like children, or like witches. Another reference was Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, whose soft-spoken, icy Lady Macbeth he much admired. Other scenes in the play he had never seen convincingly done before tempted him to try: Edward’s last moments, the court ensemble, the ghosts, Clarence’s murder. The evil Richard must be a charmer like Planchon’s attractive Tartuffe, not a caricature fascistic leader like Ian McKellen. Chéreau does not name but may also have had emulating memories of the most poisonously handsome Richard yet seen on the French stage, played by Ariel Garcia-Valdès in Lavaudant’s production.27 He wanted to know what made Lady Anne finally give in to Richard’s courting, what happened in both their heads. The scene must be long, he argued, to allow time for the level of her insults to come down, and must vibrate with eroticism, but her exposed breast at the end spells defeat, violation, while Richard’s success against all odds gives him the confidence on which he builds his progress. They spent hours rehearsing it, never to his full satisfaction. Henry VI was more of an afterthought, though Chéreau remembers being profoundly moved at age 16 by the fathers and sons who pay the toll of civil war under Henry’s mournful eye: ‘What happens off stage is terrible. The wings [la coulisse] are a leviathan that devours its children and spits them out half digested.’ In the Duke of York’s encouragements of rivalry between ‘All my sons’, he detects early intimations of King Lear: all three returned from the battlefield with bloodied swords, but Richard, who brought back an enemy’s head, ‘has best deserved’. The workshop was an occasion to ‘try and understand what Shakespeare wanted, try and come closer this way to some part of his genius’, how to interpret his ‘incredibly musical variations’ and find where the energies of each scene lay hid. The actors would be scolded if they relied on technical ability: ‘You are showing me the result, I want to see the way’.

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He felt certain that Shakespeare’s text, at its most secret, held a possibility of varying those energies ever so slightly, else the scene would fail to progress, and turn unbearably dull. What Chéreau most admired was the poet’s plasticity, his rhythmic treatment of history, dilating or contracting it as the occasion required. Shakespeare was a model of ‘true liberty’:28 he could shrink the twenty-two years of Edward’s reign to one act, then take his time to deal with a seemingly minor event like Stanley’s irruption after the death of Clarence to beg forgiveness for his servant, which gives the final blow to Edward. What Chéreau called the ‘sumptuous gratuity’ of the unexpected – there is nothing ‘gratuitous’ about Stanley’s plea, it is precisely timed, and calculated to denounce the king’s unbrotherly conduct – seems more a form of poetic immediacy, when Shakespeare shows the pregnancy of trivial incidents, and makes things work by contrast instead of concentrating on major facts. Another chilling contrast was the tender care shown to Clarence by the Lieutenant of the Tower only moments before he surrenders his keys without protest on being shown a piece of paper, and abandons him to his murderers. The Fragments alternated between good king and bad king, neither of whom could offer the right solution. Chéreau’s interest focused on the ‘out of joint’ connection between the two plays, the bascule from the teeming open-air world of Henry VI to the closed prison of Richard III, when the brew, after much boiling, simmers down to concentrate on one character at the bottom of the alembic, through a near Darwinian process of elimination. Richard rose from the murder of Henry VI and turned round after his soliloquy to greet Clarence, who is being led to prison. In the collective unconscious of the Elizabethan people, he stood for evil incarnate, a necessary evil out of which the Tudor dynasty would emerge. Queen Margaret, already a ghost of the past, there and not there, always entered unnoticed, stressing Chéreau’s obsession with exits and entrances. She embodied another, deeper obsession: her negative relation to time, mired

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as she is in her will to revenge, a theme visited in Hamlet, that Chéreau would re-explore with Elektra. Far more than the horrors she has borne, it is this incapacity to come out of her mourning that makes her a living dead. His views on Margaret tell us something ‘about Chéreau’s personal ethics, he who found his energy, at each step of his career, in his ability to untie himself from the earlier period in order to reinvent each gesture as if anew’.29 Chéreau was not interested in Richard’s final throes, once he has won the crown: after the Duchess of York’s curse, the performance stopped abruptly with Richard’s opening address to Elizabeth, ‘Madam, a word with you.’ This was not premeditated: he did try the second seduction scene with the actors, but found it too repetitive and dismissed it after a few attempts. At that point, Richard has already lost the war, no more need be said. Chéreau had no great taste for endings anyway, Loayza recalls, and generally preferred to conclude with suspense, in medias res: his Phèdre would be cut no less abruptly four lines before the end. The elegant free hand drawing, the rapid sketch of the overall design were well suited to the raw energies of his team. These were just fragments, he insisted, never a claim to have exhausted the subject. The first exercise at the table was a slanging match between the actors, who alternately played for York or Lancaster. They had been warned that the parts would be distributed at random in those early sessions; they must not set their hearts or hopes on them. Once they were finally cast, Chéreau sat alone in front of the control desk, at the point of a pyramid of assistants, with no one to obstruct his vision. Philippe Calvario, who played Henry VI and served as general assistant, was put in mind of a sports coach training a boxer: ‘He accompanied every thought, every movement, with his hands as if to sculpt them in marble or clay.’ He would bounce from his chair to stand and move the actors around like chess pieces, stalk behind them, impulse their rhythm, stress one word, order contacts or distances, then sit down again, and spend the whole rehearsal to-ing and fro-ing between the set and his seat. They

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were taught to enter as if vomited from the wings, exploit different springs of energy, never repeat themselves. At the opening, two teams in nondescript raincoats stood at both far ends of the stage, first observing then rushing against each other with fierce shouts, and wrestling in a tense pell-mell. Loud strains of hard rock punctuated the blows. After the assault, the stage was strewn with old shoes and debris that gave an impression of chaos. One of the reviewers described the show as ‘a rock-music version of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano with a hyper-vitamined sound track’.30 Extracts of Handel’s Alcina and Schubert’s Andante con moto alternated with Nina Simone singing ‘My Way’, Prince, and Pink Floyd. Each battle must strike a different note. Chéreau having declared himself bored with drums, the alleged civil attack performed before the Lord Mayor mimed an air raid, perhaps an unconscious echo of Loncrane’s scorned film. The mode of lighting inaugurated by Delannoy for Hamlet helped to structure the narration, importing into the theatre, Benhamou notes, the very logic of the cinema’s motion picture: close-up, travelling, pan, shot/reverse shot . . .31 One of the themes broached during the work at the table, Shakespeare’s sense of humour, was abandoned on the way, as if Chéreau felt that humour made them lose energy. Abandoned also on the way, for lack of time, was his original plan to share the women’s roles between two actresses, in No or Kabuki fashion. The two Margarets clung to each other like a twoheaded hydra, young chrysalis and old queen, but half-way through rehearsals Chéreau felt this ‘kind of childish trick’ disagreed with the more pressing need to tell the story of what happened within the court, when the approaching death of the monarch sharpened appetites and anxieties. It was tricky enough to monitor the changes of focus: he made them all work on the tensions underlying and finally tearing up the York party ‘like the brass or strings inside an orchestra’, but these wrangles must recede in the background when Margaret comes forward, since they were only a narrative build-up to the most important point, her curses.32

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The ensemble work of the battles also took long adjustments. Each position, each move was rehearsed till they reached perfect pitch, including the proper way to spit blood at the moment of death. They must never stand or lie parallel to the ramp, but always keep aslant, even as corpses. Partly because they lacked experience, the stress throughout was put on body language, physical energy. Chéreau rejected all attempts at romanticizing, and drove them relentlessly towards predatory attitudes. The parallel scenes of Edward’s and Richard’s courtships evoked brute carnal nature; eroticism was but part of a war game. The women were powerful, ferocious presences, not just victims or mothers of warriors but full-metal fighters themselves. Clarence’s son was played by a girl, Sarah Mesguich, who later added her voice to the wailing queens’ ‘polyphony of sorrows’. It took several stages in competitive suffering before the mourners united as an antique chorus around Anne, who walked to her coronation as to the altar of sacrifice. The farewells and ‘Pity, you ancient stones’ speech were delivered to the sounds of Alcina’s lament. Before their imprisonment, Edward’s children stood at the centre of a macabre ballet danced by the new courtiers. In the last scene, the Duchess of York spoke her final curse in the tenderest voice while caressing her son’s face. Richard’s lameness and imbalance were made ostensible by the actor’s rocking from one foot to the other, one naked, one heavily-shoed, exhibiting more muscle than nerve, Loayza deplored: the boar part largely overcast the serpent’s. His addresses to the public, as commentator of his own action, were shortened. The actor, Jérôme Huguet, had a hard time of it: his insecurity is palpable in the filmed rehearsals, when he must drag Henry VI ’s corpse off stage but feels it takes too long – ‘Je suis en carafe sur la longueur’ – or tries to deliver his soliloquy kneeling and begs an approval from Chéreau, whose only reply is ‘Can’t you do it standing?’ After an unpromising start, the young cast eventually performed with a strength and a fervour far above what Loayza had expected. Chéreau’s tempo, his intuitive rhythm, the editing of scenes around the

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gap between the two plays worked efficiently, showing up what neither play told. In Lesson 5 of the filmed document, three days before the opening, the students are invited to give their own account of the experience. They express their awe and admiration of the famed director, their will to do exactly as he wishes, his overwhelming presence, his ‘monstrous’ ability to be alert to every detail of sound, light and acting at once. Working with him was exhilarating, difficult, thought-provoking, filled with rewards and pains. They often felt inadequate to the task in this their first professional job, relentlessly pushed, but generally secure and firmly guided, though never free: even if they were allowed some leeway, the initial image was his, he was ‘inside their scene, inside them’. Nobody mentions the violent anger ignited by their lack of professionalism. While the performances were in progress, he flew back from London where he was casting Intimacy to bring them back to order with a fierce tongue lashing. Only one, Sarah Mesguich, whose family background must have taught her more Shakespeare than she cared to admit before her fellow students, clearly expresses disagreement with the director’s style, their military drilling and her resulting bruises. The brutality they were made to practise on stage woke up instincts in some she would rather avoid. Where should the brushing with reality end in a theatre, she wonders? The romanticism, the polished, rounded finish Chéreau rejected is what she likes and means to pursue, rather than throw herself against rough knees or concrete walls. Jérôme Huguet would forsake the stage for years after his ordeal, but Calvario played the bartender’s friend in Intimacy, and went on to direct Cymbeline (2000), heavily quoting Chéreau’s mannerisms, then Richard III (2005) at Les Amandiers with the popular Philippe Torreton in the title role. As for their director, he thinks he has worked with them as with professional actors, but that their inability to say no to any of his directions has encouraged some of his faults. Being aware of a ‘steamroller’ in himself, he should have resisted the generous gift of their raw energy, led them to

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explore more secret truths in and around the text. He lacked the critical feedback he expects from more seasoned performers: ‘It is in the alternative way they choose to follow, in the implicit permanent criticism of my work that I find nourishment, a permanent need to adapt my own work to the actors’ needs.’33

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Chéreau lost several collaborators in the months following Hamlet and the Avignon triumph of Les Amandiers, as drugs and AIDS took their toll. The ‘procession’ of sudden deaths in 1989–91, of the writers Koltès and Guibert, his lighting designer Delannoy, Romans, ‘accompanied my departure from Nanterre’.1 The adventure ended on a melancholy note: Here I am, caught in the maelstrom of the Hamlet tour, rehearsing the horse in Moscow, the duel in Berlin, happy to escape from Nanterre and leave the theatre before it leaves me. Strange times, when everything topples over, and everything would be so exciting if I had not lost so many friends this year.2 In 1990, he retired from theatre management. Was he also renouncing the theatre? he was repeatedly asked, and answered that he would from now on reserve it for ‘what only the theatre can show.’ His old accomplice/rival Jean-Pierre Vincent succeeded him at the steering wheel of Nanterre while he moved on to the cinema. From various testimonies, including his own, Chéreau always wanted to make films. When he does begin, at a fairly late stage, 1972, with a short black and white Le Compagnon for TV, he expects film to ‘break the screens interposed by the

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theatre’. Still, he refuses to dissociate or oppose cinema and theatre. Orson Welles, Visconti, Bergman, Kazan, who practised both, all lent items to his stage productions. The result on film was a hybrid object which eventually matured, thanks to La Reine Margot, and enabled him to achieve the kind of artwork he had in mind: ‘The work I do with actors leads me to the cinema.’3 In stage rehearsals, he stood inches away, revolving round them, whispering in their ears. His work with a camera shows an obsessive attempt to come nearer their faces, search the intimacy of the body, peal off their clothes and their skins, reach the secrets of the inner soul to understand the drama inside. He was not happy with his early attempts, La Chair de l’orchidée, drawn from Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and Judith Therpauve, neither of which got very good reviews. As often happens with artists who change media, the critics took their time before they considered him a genuine filmmaker. The first film he himself approved of was L’Homme blessé (1983), based on a screenplay he wrote with Hervé Guibert, and featuring Jean-Hugues Anglade (Chéreau’s Charles IX -tobe) in the title role: written before the first symptoms of AIDS struck, it dealt explicitly with the theme of homosexuality and brought into full sight what French cinema previously hid or only hinted at.4 His next attempt, Hôtel de France, met with less than polite indifference and was deemed pessimistic, a judgement he rejected: ‘Hope is a very violent thing: that is why I will never recognize myself in the word: pessimism. To me, a pessimistic film would show people who have reached the end of their tether, or who think they have.’5 The violence of his films expressed a will to live a better life, a violent refusal to give up. Professing a boundless admiration for Orson Welles, not only did he try to copy what he understood of his films, he ‘desperately looked inside them for their Shakespearean inspiration’.6 The next attempt would take years to mature after Hôtel, but he was already working on it when Hamlet went on tour.

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Filming corpses – from Le Radeau de la Méduse to Timisoara Most of Chéreau’s films are derived from texts. Desarthe had given him a copy of Marlowe’s Massacre; now Danièle Thompson, a fan of Alexandre Dumas, made him read La Reine Margot. Dumas himself shared the Romantics’ passion for Elizabethan drama. His novel, influenced by Walter Scott’s precedents, was filled with Shakespearean references, and hallucinating images of bloodshed. As in a revenge tragedy, poison enters the parts that blades won’t touch, smeared on gloves, lover’s lips, books, sometimes killing the wrong victim. Corpses fall from windows, daggers pierce through the flesh to the shouts of ‘Kill! Kill!’, throats are slit, limbs and heads crushed under boot soles. Narrated by a thug with a strong German accent, the murder of Admiral de Coligny mixes horror and grotesque. The Louvre palace teems with spies and informers involved in double plots. Astrology has prophesied that Henri de Navarre will reign over France, and despite all the efforts of the Florentine arch-villain Queen Catherine to have him murdered, her son Charles IX dies in his place. At the end of the novel blood oozes from the pores of the poisoned king, whose hand ‘hung down outside the bed, and at the end of each of the fingers trembled a drop of blood, like a liquid ruby’. As he bleeds to death, his old nurse, a Protestant, reminds him that ‘it was the blood of the Huguenots shed on St. Bartholomew’s Day which thus in vengeance demanded the blood of the King’.7 Dumas drew his female characters mostly from Protestant pamphlets, especially Le Divorce satyrique (1607), attributed to Agrippa d’Aubigné, which paints Marguerite de Valois as a whore and Catherine as an evil manipulator. Although the novel treats Margot’s romantic affair with sympathy, the feminist scholar Geneviève Sellier thinks it reflects a general hostility, dominant in the nineteenth century and still today, to powerful females.8 The film drew floods of essays in gender

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studies, in which the character of Margot was either criticized as a puppet in the male power games, or saluted for her stance against moral, social and political conventions. To Sellier, Chéreau far exceeds Dumas’ erotic vision of her by using ‘some of the worst political-pornographic pamphlets under the pretext of a realist vision of the Valois court, making Marguerite a nymphomaniac’.9 Feminist issues were not among Chéreau’s main concerns. He and Thompson found more sordid details in pamphlets unknown to Dumas like Le réveille-matin des François (1574), which reports rumours of Margot’s incestuous relations with her brothers, while the blow delivered by Charles IX to make her seemingly agree to marry Navarre is a forgery of the historiographer Eudes de Mézeray (1646). There is no comedy left in the killing scenes, nor did they attempt to rehabilitate the much-slandered Catherine de Medici.10 After Marlowe’s portrayal, Chéreau did not need Dumas to make her the villain of the piece: in Massacre, where events are shown from the Protestant viewpoint, Margot has only a small part, but Catherine is the prime schemer with Guise, and deliberately poisons her elder son to make Anjou king. After reading extensively in the preparatory phase, Chéreau usually clung to one scholarly work through each film or stage production: Müller for Richard II, Hans Mayer for the Ring, Dover Wilson for Hamlet . . . In the cinema Eisenstein, one of his tutelary figures, had opened the way by drawing on Seneca, Marlowe and Webster to enter the mind of his Ivan the Terrible. Now Heinrich Mann’s ‘Shakespearean’ Die Jugend des Königs Henri IV, which focuses on Navarre, was to be his main guide through the writing of the screenplay. After his humiliating visit to Cannes with Hôtel de France, Chéreau was much tempted by the idea of making a grand popular epic. When questioned on the role of history in his work generally, he explained his main interest was for ‘l’aujourdhui’, contemporary history and the people who inhabit it. His understanding of the past was guided by the need to investigate origins, and revolved around an artist’s

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vision, Wagner’s Germany, Shakespeare and Marlowe’s England.11 Anachronisms did not worry him. His research around the French religious wars was eclectic, ranging from Marguerite de Valois’ Mémoires et Lettres12 to Dumas’ novel and Heinrich Mann’s Novel of Henri IV. As was his wont, he also suggested varied readings to his team: Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé, a reformed libertine, to inform Pascal Greggory’s perverse Duke of Anjou, Starobinski’s study of Les Fêtes galantes for Philippe Rousselot’s lighting of the marriage feast. The scriptwriters of La Reine Margot – he the idol of the cultural elite, she (Danièle Thompson) who penned crowdpleasers like Rabbi Jacob – came from opposite poles of the French screen, ‘cinéma d’auteur’ versus ‘cinéma de genre’. More than ever before, Shakespeare was a model in Chéreau’s determination to overcome the traditional divisions between literary/artistic fiction and popular entertainment. He wanted to recreate the themes and atmosphere of the Elizabethan Renaissance, For it is Shakespeare and Marlowe that one must find in this movie. Find the violent narration, the obvious structure, go back to the Elizabethan drama, go back to the great History, the one that crushes men and women, the one that has lost all meaning, that has become, as Shakespeare says, just ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’.13 Even more Elizabethan than Chéreau knew, perhaps, for it was via Queen Elizabeth herself that the name of the French Protestant alliance, the Malcontents, travelled to England. When she finally broke up her flirtation with her ‘Frog’, François d’Alençon, the then Duke of Anjou, she invoked a fierce popular opposition to their match: ‘Our people ought to congratulate and to applaud’, she wrote him, but ‘the public exercise of the Roman religion sticks so much in their hearts, that I shall never consent to your coming among such malcontents’.14 In a decade or so, notorious malcontents would enter the Elizabethan stage.

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Dumas’ plot opens the hostilities with another royal match. The wedding of Navarre to the Valois Princess, ostensibly designed to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant parties, attracts thousands of Huguenots in Paris like lambs to the slaughter. On screen, under the title ‘1572’, we read that ‘Margot’s wedding, a symbol of peace and reconciliation, will be used to set off the greatest massacre in the history of France.’ The film aimed to show an age both pagan and fanatical, its incredible mix of religion and sensuality, death and carnal appetites, a sense of guilt and a taste for pleasure.15 As in Shakespeare, venery was a major guideline, from the tracking of Protestants in town to the royal boar hunt in the forest, moved by ambition, fear, love and lust. As in an Elizabethan tragedy, and in Dumas’ novel, the passions and betrayals tearing up the royal family reverberate at State level in the religious conflicts that tore up the nation. They are a ‘slightly unusual family’, Anjou warns his new brother-in-law Navarre, grossly understating the case: a few rapid asides soon reveal their incestuous and criminal records, while the rowdy marriage feast alternates brutal fights and torrid orgies. Concentrating all desires, Margot is, to her interpreter Adjani, ‘an ill-loved child wearing a queen’s armour’. During the preparatory phase, the synopsis went through nine different versions. Comparisons with the storyboard show that Chéreau did not feel tied up either by the novel or by his own script, and allowed room for improvisation. He saw in the massacre not a popular uprising, but a wellmonitored military operation, reminiscent of the militia’s roundups during the Occupation. The invented character of the Jewish burgess drawn after a Rembrandt painting, who offers help to the fugitives, was an homage to the Protestants who hid runaway Jews in occupied France. When Chéreau and Thompson started work on the script, the threat of religious fanaticism was back in Europe. It began with the demonstrations at the burial of Ayatollah Khomeiny in Tehran and culminated two years later with the ethnic purification of Yugoslavia. By the time the film was finished, the Rwanda genocide and

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Srebrenica had happened. It was no coincidence, while Sarajevo was besieged, that Chéreau asked the Serbo-Croat Goran Bregovic, Kusturica’s composer for Time of the Gypsies and Arizona Dream, to write the score of La Reine Margot. The massacre unrolled to the strains of a dirge that mixed synthetic percussions, plainsong, Corsican melodies and old Balkan tunes. At the end of the film Margot sits in the coach driving her to Navarre with La Mole’s still bleeding head on her knees, to the sounds of ‘Elo Hi’, a lullaby interpreted by the Israeli singer Ofra Haza. In the history of sixteenth-century France, Bregovic heard the story of his own country in the twentieth. The experience so marked him that six years later he created his Margot, mémoires d’une reine malheureuse, a recitando accompagnato confronting the fates of Marguerite de Valois and a woman caught in the Bosnian war.16 Few images remained in the film of the earlier Massacre, and not a drop of water. Yet Chéreau’s first pictorial inspiration was Le Radeau de la Méduse, which Géricault had prepared for with visits to the morgue of the nearby Beaujon hospital where he drew sketches of the corpses. Those were augmented by large collections of images, from Goya’s cartloads of corpses to Zoran Music’s sketches of his own internment at Dachau. Death was everywhere around, closer to home with the ranks of Chéreau’s friends depleted by AIDS and overdoses. As Puddick notes, ‘The film’s vivid corporeal imagery of blood, sexuality and death was associated with the AIDS crisis, which was at its height in the early 1990s.’17 Death was also high in the world’s news, with images of bodies lined up after Tiananmen, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, and the recently discovered charnels of Timisoara. To kill in the name of God inevitably brings us back to the present. Historians complained Chéreau had not paid sufficient attention to Denis Crouzet’s Guerriers de Dieu, which exposes the killers’ obsession with the stain of heresy, their purifying rituals: he had left the ‘sacred’ out of ‘sacred violence’.18 There were lessons to be learnt, Chéreau felt, from the Renaissance massacre: the fact that no one knows exactly what started it;

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its mad ‘electricity’; and the fear of further slaughters after Charles IX ’s famous sentence, ‘Kill them all, let not one survive to upbraid me with this’. Did he mean all the Protestants, or all their leaders? In the film, De Guise wants eleven killed, and Anjou – who counts them on his fingers – raises the figure to fourteen. But things run out of control and the denunciations degenerate, as they did during the Occupation.19 In mid-shoot, Adjani went to Algeria to take sides with opponents to the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and denounce the barbarity of butchers who killed in the name of religion. On her return, Chéreau’s most striking innovation was to alter her stance in the plot: ‘in an empty room, as through an airlock, she moves from the executioners’ camp to the victims’.’20 In 1994, he offered to the inhabitants of bombarded Sarajevo a free screening of La Reine Margot as a token of his support to oppressed people.21 The dirge would take on the magnitude of an opera in De la maison des morts, drawn from Dostoevsky’s From the House of the Dead. The film’s grand cinematographic design was acidly summed up by a reviewer as ‘a period soaper steeped in blood, lust and brocade’.22 Blood does besmear the characters and the walls, yet this is by no means a gore movie. The murders are dimly lit, with none of the viscerae or wounds visible like the one exposing Coligny’s skull in the novel, but each death calls for a pause. When they began work on the screenplay, Thompson recalls, Chéreau ‘was fascinated by the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, by ideological murder, “the bloody passage from one era to another”.’23 As a teenager, she herself had devoured Dumas and his Valois saga, La Dame de Montsoreau, La Reine Margot, Les Quarante-Cinq. Seven years and 120 million French francs later (approximately £10 million), the film was shown on 13 May 1994 at Festival de Cannes, where it attracted the attention of American producers, and was consequently re-edited for the American market.24 The sneak previews in New York revealed a marked distaste for scenes like King Charles’s agony. According to the reports, ‘The overall violence in the film bothered a great number of people.

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Most respondents felt that the violence was too graphic and there was too much blood.’ A great majority found it too long for a movie. Various cuts were suggested, most of which Chéreau accepted, but he staunchly refused any alterations to Margot’s nuptials, the autopsy, or the hunting scene, and made his own, finer cuts. Nor did he want the violence of the film toned down.25 With a total of 190 cuts, some of them ‘infinitesimal’, he worked to make it more dynamic, more ‘nervous’, a recurrent word in his vocabulary.26 A text providing a historical foreword was inserted before the first image, and additional pieces of music throughout to stress emotions or danger points. French tastes may not have been so different from American ones: when the altered version returned on the French screens, it received a much larger welcome. Both Claude Berri, the first producer, and Danièle Thompson declared their preference for the new version. The reviewers generally found it easier on the eye and more popular. As for Chéreau, he thought it a luxury to be able to refine his copy as he persistently did in the theatre. Margot taught him how to make a historical film, and strive to avoid the clichés of his predecessors. He carefully steered clear of pathos, causing numerous critics to complain at his cold dissection of horrors: the cinema specialist Jacqueline Nacache imputes their perplexity, and resentment, to the fact they could not identify his film with any existing genres or codes.27 Thompson’s dialogues are terse and to the point. The lyricism, when it creeps in, comes straight from Dumas, for instance La Mole’s request that, should his head be severed from his body by the executioner, Margot will keep it and occasionally press her lips to his. What mattered most to Chéreau was not the exact detail of the costly historical reconstitution, but the ‘constructing thread of emotions and faces’, the arguments on how many Protestants should be killed that took place around a table: to compose this scene, he did not draw on Renaissance paintings of the event, but more on Coppola’s Godfather. The resemblance with the triumvirate’s proscription scene in Julius Caesar was certainly

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not coincidental either: while he wrote the script, Claude Stratz was directing Shakespeare’s play in a translation he had commissioned from Michel Vinaver. The following year Chéreau commissioned from the same Vinaver a translation of Botho Strauss’s Die Zeit und das Zimmer, after Bondy’s creation at the Schaubühne, and had Vinaver’s daughter Anouk Grinberg play the lead.28 Money was a crucial issue, and created its own difficulties when vast amounts were involved, as they were here: the temptations to leverage their investments, when a frustrated scenographer or an irate producer understood that the expensive sets and crowds of extras would only appear on screen for a few seconds. Even in costumes, or echoes of costumes, the contemporary is what Chéreau shows, on stage or on film. Historical costumes can hinder movement, and make the acting more conventional. Sets too can be cumbersome, even if he always made great use of them. The cinema was not the ideal medium for Mies van der Rohe’s motto, Less is more, which guided Chéreau’s and Peduzzi’s aesthetics. Berri, the producer, was furious to have paid for splendid ceilings with frescoes that were barely visible because most of the scenes were filmed in close shots. His head cameraman Rousselot devised a special technique borrowed from the theatre to change lights at each movement of the camera, ‘except that in a theatre you see the changes, but in the film you don’t’.29 He had electricians follow the actors like a ballet of fireflies with Japanese lanterns made of light cotton wool. The old complicity with Peduzzi and with Moidele Bickel carried them through, but again, both these artists were required to go beyond their limits. Chéreau forged a new resolution: when he returns to the theatre, as he will, he told interviewers, he means to aim at a sober resolutely contemporary sparsity where sets and costumes will hardly matter, based exclusively on the presence of actors.30 Chéreau always had ambivalent feelings and ambiguities about the star system. Famous names had been part of Les Amandiers’ policy to draw large audiences to the theatre. But

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beyond their obvious box-office value, he was like a ‘midinette’, a sentimental groupie, in his friends’ amused recollections, constantly fascinated by the star quality, the glamour and mystery they brought to a production: he was one of the first to break unspoken rules of the public theatre by recruiting famous film actors for his stage productions, such as Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin, with unequal success. Before Virna Lisi, he had hoped to have Sophia Loren play Catherine de Medici. La Reine Margot owed much of its appeal to its star actress, Isabelle Adjani, especially after the American revisions that increased her pre-eminence. Not only did she come with a strong theatrical CV, having been at age 16 the youngest member of Comédie-Française, she embodied Richard Dyer’s ‘perfect fit’ between character construction and star image. Chéreau even hoped at one point to cast Daniel Day-Lewis, her current lover, for the part of La Mole, further evidence of an inextricable fusion.31 Adjani’s tormented affairs, her tragic roles as Adèle Hugo and Camille Claudel, the false news that she had died of AIDS , were all fused in the screenplay with the slanderous rumours that were part of the ‘Margot myth’. Labelled ‘a nefarious whore’ before her first entrance, Margot wants ‘to see the image of my death amidst my pleasure’, she tells her lover De Guise. Adjani’s white skin and blue eyes caught the light even in the darkest scenes, as did untold echoes of the latest news, that this perfect incarnation of the white woman was in fact a ‘Beur’ (slang for Arab), born from a mixed marriage of a German mother and Algerian father. Facing her erotic death wish, Chéreau put equal emphasis on male anatomy and dissection. Scenes focused on the wounded La Mole or the dying Charles IX ‘foreground the suffering male body through expressive imagery that powerfully juxtaposes death and desire.’32 ‘We, the actors, we knew we would suffer’, Vincent Pérez recalls, evoking Chéreau’s ‘titanesque work with the extras. He arranged his corpses like a sculptor or a painter.’ Playing La Mole, Pérez spent whole nights half-naked on the pavement of a Bordeaux street, his face in the dust, sliding over

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gory bodies. To Dominique Blanc, Margot’s friend Henriette de Nevers, ‘Each day felt like climbing a mountain’. On her first day she had to wait eight hours before she was called on the set to run through a pack of stuntmen wielding swords for a two-minute shot.33

Exile – from lonely islands to dirty London With Margot, Chéreau felt he had managed at last ‘a kind of cinema that looked like him’.34 Yet it would be his last of its kind. Another grand design, Le Monstre de Longwood, a projected film with Al Pacino and Juliette Binoche, on Napoleon’s last love in Saint-Helena, was abandoned after seven years’ work and vain attempts to find adequate funding. The script was based on Staton Rabin’s Betsy and the Emperor, perhaps not the best approach to Chéreau’s own concerns: he had in mind the theme of exile, centred on this man who had dominated his time and sent millions to their deaths, then found himself facing the void. His guides to Napoleon were Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe and the backstairs history of G. Lenôtre he had read as a teenager. He had long wanted to work with Al Pacino who, like him, had ‘a foot on both sides’, cinema and theatre: ‘He never moves far away from the theatre, he constantly returns to Shakespeare’. This Napoleon would be ‘a genetic cross between the historical character and King Lear, with just a pinch of Richard III ’.35 There were several drafts, the last one by Chéreau and Paul Auster. He had almost got the ‘minimum’ he needed to do the thing properly, €26 million, when Pathé cut down its contribution: ‘Eight years and 28 scripts, then they lopped €6 million off the budget! I had to drop it.’36 There were other obstacles, a rival Napoleon and Betsy with Scarlett Johansson in the role,37 and a serious misunderstanding on the part of Al Pacino: according to Chéreau, he was unconvinced by the

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script, having in mind an American style of hero, self-made son of the people, and kept asking ‘Where is Josephine?’38 In July 2009, the director announced he was finally giving up: huge projects like La Reine Margot had become out of reach.39 He was now working on a more ‘intimate’, much less expensive film: Son frère was done in seven months with seven people on the set, ‘Even less than Eric Rohmer!’ He was also directing Dominique Blanc at Les Amandiers in Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur. And preparing the performance in New York of Janácˇek’s last opera, From the House of the Dead . . . A clash of different rhythms: an opera must be planned two or three years ahead, but there is no certainty three months before shooting starts whether a film will happen or not. This did not make him a jack of all trades, he claimed: ‘Whether it’s opera, film or theatre, it’s the same métier – you tell a story with actors, using different tools. The three strands complement each other. I refuse to keep doing things I know how to do.’40 Discussing these and his next projects, he firmly rejected, again, the notion that he was a maker of ‘gay movies’: ‘My vocation is to be universal, speak to everybody. On no account will I let my homosexuality restrict me to dealing with homosexual matters. As I see things, sexuality is everywhere, hetero and homo, and the frontier is far from airtight between the two.’41 An entirely different kind of film initiated Chéreau’s movement away from grand historical epics, back to the close search of bodies and souls: ‘when you “feed” actors, whether with films (Still Walking for Rêve d’automne), texts (Oscar Wilde for Gabrielle), or anecdotes and memories (Anna Magnani for Waltraud in Elektra), or something seen in the street, or even very personal, indeed intimate impressions – you do your job by trying to plant something inside them, in the best sense, hoping that it will “take”.’42 His autobiographical Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, filmed in a reconstitution of the painter Jean-Baptiste Chéreau’s studio, was haunted by memories of ‘a famous bad father, King Lear. And later, King Lear stood between us like a house in which we met to imagine other things’, his co-writer recalls.43 The film also took a leaf

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from Lars von Trier’s camera-on-the-shoulder mode, but apart from technique, Breaking the Waves was the ultimate encouragement Chéreau needed to turn nudity into spirituality. Son frère completed a family trilogy, after Ceux qui m’aiment and Intimacy.44 The desire to film Isabelle Huppert in Gabrielle, which tells the wreck of a bourgeois couple, sprang from one enigmatic sentence he wanted to understand in Conrad’s The Return, ‘If I had believed you loved me . . . I would never have come back.’ Very little is said about her in the story; the woman who could speak such a sentence had to be reinvented. Intimacy was based on two stories by Hanif Kureishi,45 an author Chéreau was attracted to since watching My Beautiful Launderette in the company of Koltès. Another source strongly influenced its colours and lights: the photographer Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which Chéreau gave to his chief operator and his costume designer. Mark Rylance was Jay, a failed musician turned bartender who meets Claire, a mediocre actress played by Kerry Fox, every Wednesday for mute sex. On a door of the pub where he works a notice reads ‘Theatre & Toilets’. There but for fortune, Rylance thought: ‘It was like a funny way of the fates giving me an opportunity to live out some karma without having to really live it out.’ He and Chéreau did not immediately see eye to eye: Rylance was not used to being directed, and Chéreau only understood the quality of his performance when he saw the edited rushes. Again, he was dissatisfied with the ending. In Kureishi’s story, the mystery woman’s last word, ‘Yes’, implies that she will leave her husband, but in the final stages of editing, Chéreau felt it was out of character, and changed it to a ‘No’ lifted from an earlier scene: when Claire boards the bus, she is going back home, with the belief she can be faithful to two men, two different adventures of life, just as his own mother had never left his truant father to live with her lover.46 The British critics of the film were deeply shocked to see the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe perform oral sex stark naked, yet to his American interviewer, ‘it wasn’t the nudity or

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the sex that made it hard to watch but rather the sight of a man stripped to his core.’ In her opinion, ‘Many European film critics have seen the sex scenes as part of a deeper story about emotions; others, particularly in Britain, have focused on nothing but the mechanics.’47 Alexander Linklater, Kerry Fox’s boyfriend in real life, anatomized his jealousy at great length in The Guardian. He had first experienced it as a teenager when, playing William in As You Like It, he fell in love with Audrey, then saw her have sex with Touchstone in the back seat of a car. Now, having read Kerry’s script, he wondered how much of the offensive scene would actually be shown, and tried to master his feelings with a touch of Shakespeare philosophy: ‘Which is the worst? Seeing nothing, or something, or everything? I thought of Touchstone and Audrey, and the world seemed to flicker in negative.’ Chéreau’s choice, ‘everything’, ignited a more elaborate thought process about the treatment of sex in Britain, the huge amount of sexually charged advertisements, of semi-pornographic magazines, ‘but almost no truthful images of it at all. Intimacy is irrelevant to debates about pornography. It doesn’t blur the line between art-house movie and top-shelf video. It makes it clearer.’ Not showing was not an option, for it ran counter to the instinct of the cinema. So, the question was whether the quality of this film would justify the risks taken by the actors. After a private screening, Linklater turned into its best advocate: ‘Dirty London had never, I felt, been portrayed as honestly and luminously as this. There was a sublime ugliness to the film’. And best of all, the memory of Audrey had rid him of his jealous urge.48 His brave support could not quite match the ‘purse-lipped literalness’ or the vulgarity of some headlines. As for the French critics, they certainly did not wish to appear purse-lipped. Several celebrated this raw but delicate treatment of physical desire, an obsessive theme of French authorial cinema, but most of them only had tepid praise for the film, which they found overloaded by Chéreau’s obsession to make it ‘look like cinema’, its show of virtuosity, and its excess of cultural

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references.49 Chéreau had spent three months in a Soho flat over a busy pub, adapting Kureishi’s ‘pitiless but tender language’, watching a tape of Wong Kar Way’s Happy Together (a road movie shot in Argentina by the Hong-Kong filmmaker), taking long walks through the town, unveiling his intimate thoughts to drive his actors along with him: ‘Everyone today asks the question how to represent sex on screen. I will only know mine when I have finished the editing.’ He had chosen to lose himself ‘like a dazzled foreigner’ in London because he would be less inhibited there, and felt the need to estrange himself from his usual haunts.50

Dancing over graves – the Louvre at midnight Another project began with Shakespeare and ended, after several metamorphoses, set on the smallest possible island – a raft in I Am the Wind.51 Chéreau had been insistently invited by David Lan to direct a play at the Young Vic, and after several ‘maybes’, eventually decided on Macbeth, which he had seen as a teenager in the late 1950s, played by Alain Cuny and Maria Casarès under Jean Vilar’s direction.52 The moving forest was another attraction. With Patrice, every positive came with a negative, David Lan found. He was aware of the risks of performing Shakespeare in the poet’s own language and country, with ‘no possibility of hiding behind a translation’.53 Was it all right for a French director to do Shakespeare in English? Yes, Lan confidently answered; his spoken English was not perfect but very good, and the Young Vic would provide all he might want. The British press didn’t like him, Chéreau further objected; they had given very bad reviews to La Dispute when it came to the National Theatre . . . thirty years ago! Rylance remembers Chéreau ‘asked him to be involved but they didn’t get to the stage of discussing the project. Though he respects Patrice as an artist and a man very

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much, he didn’t feel that they had a very happy working relationship on Intimacy so he declined the role of Macbeth.’54 Other actors were considered, most prominently Joseph Mawle, but the desire to do the play was waning: ‘I have done too many fights,’ Chéreau told Lan. ‘I know how to do it, I am good at it, but it is too much blood.’ It was crazy to do his English premiere with Shakespeare. Later maybe, but for now, he had another idea. A note in the diary of his Louvre exhibition recalls the failed hope, and its unexpected outcome: ‘Tonight I flutter around, as the saying goes, read one book then the next, fuse this Macbeth that I will not direct in London with the Fosse play I will do instead, this film I’m finishing, the sound mixing, and it occurs to me I am not at all serious, one needs to be serious, it is high time now. But isn’t that the way I have always worked?’55 Only a handful in England knew Chéreau’s work, Lan lamented, and most of that handful vaguely thought it had ‘something to do with Wagner’. But directors from around the world flew to London to see I Am the Wind. Like Chéreau, Jon Fosse had had poor success in Britain so far, because, he thinks, ‘In England, theatre is connected to dialect and what level of society you’re speaking from. Elsewhere, it’s a poetical reflection of the basics of life.’56 I Am the Wind features two nameless characters in a boat rocked by the waves. No one, including the author, quite knows what it is about, and it is the freedom allowed by its elliptic dialogues that particularly attracted its director. Jack Laskey, who played The Other, had found the play ‘dead simple’ when he first read it: ‘Now I feel differently about it every day. And Patrice does something that very few directors can: opening all these different paths up, but leaving you to decide which route to take.’57 They did not quite reverse British Euroscepticism. The play was generally thought bleak, obscure, pretentious, pseudo-Beckettian: ‘In short, it is a play which has clearly somehow fallen outside the unwritten rules of British theatre’, The Guardian diagnosed.58 When the production came to Paris, the French reviewers praised the quality of British acting and the formal virtuosity

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of Peduzzi’s set, an unsteady raft on a wet beach, but were also slightly nonplussed as to the meaning of the play. One critic pointed out that Fosse was playing a game as old as the theatre, denouncing the weakness of language while revelling in it: when The One complains that The Other speaks only ‘Words, words and more words’, ‘as in the Hamlet scene, each answer of the hero, instead of bringing him closer to men, stresses the depth of his estrangement’. Even the most melancholy hero of Western drama laughed at the cliché that lends its title to Fosse’s play: ‘ “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw”, he claimed, to mock Polonius’.59 It was not Chéreau’s first encounter with the Norwegian playwright. When offered ‘carte blanche’ (free rein) by Henri Loyrette to be the third grand invité, after Pierre Boulez and Umberto Eco, with the whole Louvre at his disposal to gather the talents of his choice, he made Fosse’s Rêve d’automne the centre piece of his three-month programme. It was for Chéreau a unique opportunity to reflect on his own work and bring together its components. The whole experience is recalled in his personal diary, later adapted for the theatre. It included two exhibitions, one entitled ‘Les visages et les corps’ for which half a dozen French and foreign museums lent canvasses of his own choosing; another, ‘Derrière les images’, illustrating the director’s universe, a selection of films, performances of Rêve d’automne, Coma and La Nuit juste avant les forêts, Nan Goldin’s Scopophilia, Wagner’s five Wesendonck Lieder sung by Waltraud Meier, concerts with Barenboim and Boulez directing Alban Berg, Stravinsky, a tribute to Merce Cunningham, screenings of Chéreau’s own films and operas, and of Stéphane Metge’s Leçons de théâtre.60 The guiding theme, faces and bodies, would be further developed in his last public appearance, a seminar on ‘Narration and the actor’s body’ in Santander where he was determined to go against medical advice after Elektra, to pursue his reflection on his own progress. There, before a group of Spanish students, he evoked for the last time the excitement of conveying stories

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‘through the body, the face, the gaze of an actor or group of actors’, so that ‘they become meaningful to us, so that they tell us about the world’.61 Chéreau compared himself to a ‘voleur à l’étalage’ (pilferer): ‘And out of everything I have stolen, I build my personal museum.’62 The connecting link between these artistic gestures was his reading of the outside world, reflected in his own career and his direction of actors, the morbidity of his vision constantly balanced by hard work and incandescent desire, his agonistic confrontation with death in and outside the theatre. He gave a reading of Coma, Guyotat’s autobiographical story of an existential crisis, drug addiction, anxiety attacks, anorexia, rehearsals of his Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats with Vitez, Jaruzelski’s state of siege in Poland, depression, internments, and painful rebirth through the struggle with his writing materials: ‘after the fact, it is all through the book that awareness and dispossession, uprooting and cultivation of the “ego” seem to have mutually fed off each other’.63 Around the spoken words, Chéreau’s choice of canvasses established correspondences, echoes, intimate links between paintings that had their resonance in himself, summoned by his lonely walks at night through the museum to make his selection. Nan Goldin’s photographs of empty hotel and hospital rooms, of her own friends in the terminal phase of AIDS , seemed mirrored in the shivering bloodied body brought in for treatment at the opening of La Nuit juste avant les forêts. But where Koltès at its creation wanted it performed ‘over an hour without any movement, close shot on the gob!’, Chéreau asked the actor Romain Duris to accompany the text ‘by the body’s work, a body filled with beer, rebellion and despair, until its final immobility on the ground’.64 The plays and readings were staged in collaboration with the choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang who, like Chéreau, was involved in a long-distance quest for new energies and movements of the body on stage. Chéreau’s work was to ‘unknit’ the actors’ constructions of the text, to reach what is behind the words and cannot be told by words: ‘What is not visible to the eye is

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precisely what dancing can touch.’ To Thieû Niang, the director was ‘no longer an omnipotent king but a member, perhaps the most important one, of a family gathered to create something without anyone feeling dispossessed of anything’.65 This was the ideal image Chéreau had reached for even at his most despotic, and that the Louvre exhibition aimed to show in action. It was Boulez, while looking for a libretto to make into an opera, who made Chéreau read Jon Fosse. Rêve d’automne, read while he was visiting the empty rooms of the museum, brought together the main themes of the projected event: ‘Faces who love so much and suffer too much, sex and suicide loitering around, bodies who want everything, and a heart, Guyotat would say, that pumps only blood, blood that no longer warms you.’66 The play is located in a churchyard, which in the Louvre event becomes the museum itself, a place peopled by ghosts, where dead works of art interact with living visitors. The actors’ bodies, shapes, movements, looks and tears echoed those on the walls: portraits of loving couples, tortured faces, diseased bodies, suicides. Philippe de Champaigne’s Dead Christ was surrounded by Titian, Raphaël and Rubens, Bonnard, Courbet, Géricault, Francis Bacon, Picasso, and drawings his father Jean-Baptiste made while in hospital. The titles of the paintings became inscriptions on the gravestones. It was this vision of corpses climbing down from their canvasses to morph into live bodies that made Adjani fear he was crossing extremes.67 Bulle Ogier, playing the dead Mother whose funeral brings them all to the churchyard, was disoriented with Chéreau’s new manner of working, of sending them directly on the set without any preamble, and hurt by the brutality of his direction.68 When the production moved to Théâtre de la Ville, Peduzzi recreated the Salon Denon where it was first performed, raising, again, Chéreau’s question at its most haunted: is art a corpse exhibited in museums? Is the theatre itself a museum of the living-dead? Chéreau was attracted by the radical sparsity of Fosse’s play, its dilated, seamless temporality. He described it as a

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magnificent love story, but he found the second part, which involves the parents of the protagonists, less successful, and he had difficulty treating the leaps in time. When questioned about it, instead of a straight answer, Jon Fosse had sidestepped ‘as playwrights always do’ and told him he loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chéreau then re-read Dream and found ‘a tenuous link’ with Rêve d’automne on which, like Fosse, he did not elaborate. Fosse wanted audiences to laugh and cry at the same time, but there was little to laugh about in Chéreau’s oratorio of desire, denial, love and death.69

8 Farewell to Shakespeare

Chéreau’s intermittent relations with the theatre in the last phase of his career fought an obsession with death and showed a drive towards perfect simplicity, sparseness, as if he were divesting himself, Peer or Hamlet-like, from all former tricks and adornments. His obsessive will to not repeat what he had already done and was best able to do guided this quest for the essence of the theatre, a concentration on its basis, the words of the text, whether in an opera, play or film, spoken by actors or singers, or at its most naked, reading on an empty stage. In Thieû Niang’s du printemps!, a cast of 28 amateur seniors interpreted Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. Chéreau introduced the forty-minute dance by reading extracts from Nijinski’s Notebooks.1 Moving among the dancers, barefoot with script in hand, he sketched ‘an intaglio portrait of this man, suffering, knocked up and beautiful none the less in his absolute dismay’.2 The participants performed their own vulnerability and will to dance until, exhausted, they moved out of the ring. As for Thieû Niang, ‘My work was to put the bodies into motion, dream their movement with him, attempt those leaps, falls and other crossings.’ From various testimonies, the lessons taught by dance brought a decisive change to Chéreau’s understanding of the body in his direction of the actors’.3 Lucien and Micheline Attoun were moved to tears by the heart-rending beauty of movement in De la maison des morts. ‘In your early days you made us laugh with

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Labiche’, Lucien told him, ‘now you make us weep.’ What Chéreau had done was translate into action the words of Dostoevsky after four years in a Siberian prison camp, words that Janácˇ ek wrote above his score: ‘In every creature, a spark of God’. ‘That’s what you must remember’, Chéreau explains in an interview, and that is why his costumes were timeless: ‘Our job is to make it possible to think about all the prisons at any time.’ If people are scared by the idea of life in prison, they will find that ‘life in this jail is incredibly alive, incredibly strong; it is exactly our life, reconstructed in a jail.’4 In Act 1, the inmates come out of the showers shivering, a reminder of the concentration camps. In Act 2 they express their frustrations, sexual and all, in a show presented before their fellows. In Act 3, the wounded eagle they have healed flies over their heads. When From the House of the Dead was performed at the Metropolitan, the New York arts critic Michael Miller marvelled that ‘the naughty Wunderkind’ of the Bayreuth Ring should ‘emerge as a humanist of so much mature empathy and depth’.5 Delia Casadei saluted the symbiosis between the musical imagery and the visual realization, the body language that Chéreau had developed with the singers: ‘the inmates walk around like cripples, their movements are awkward and sudden. Dancing takes on a special function as the ultimate signifier of utter despair.’6 Another reviewer noted ‘the volatile mix of restless tension and crushing boredom’ that Chéreau’s production captured, the ‘humdrum individuality’ of each prisoner: ‘That even in this prison they cling to a shred of privacy was a poignant touch in the staging.’7 Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducted the opera in New York, recalled Chéreau’s work with the performers, ‘like building a cathedral stone by stone’: he did not treat the chorus as a lump of people, each one was ‘an individual, with a temperament and an imaginary narrative’. If the singers lacked acting talent, he would tirelessly work with them, help them with physical props, and guide them away from operatic gesticulating: ‘not for one second would you think these little gestures are happening because M. Chéreau has told the singers to do them.

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Rather, you think, This is the story. This is the way it has to go. That is the greatest praise you can get: the director has rubbed himself out of the picture.’8 The drive towards sparseness was at least partly dictated by lack of the funds required to put on ambitious productions. In periods of scarcity, Chéreau gave readings of his favourite texts on a bare stage, for which Thierry Thieû Niang coached him. Was he aiming to reach the essence of a director’s job? The essence, I don’t know . . . but a modest reflexion begun six years ago at my first public readings, when slowly came up to the surface the work I do with actors, and which I only truly developed with the soliloquies of Koltès or of Shakespeare. In other words, the actor’s relation to speech and to a thought, the work of the voice, of the inflexion, what is commonly called le phrasé.9 Colette Godard, who had followed Chéreau’s career from its earliest stages, thought the readings lacked a major component of all his productions, conflict, and were but impoverished sparks of the flamboyant director she so admired. But the journalist Brigitte Hernandez for one keeps a searing memory of his Coma, more spoken than read, in shirt and jeans, barefoot as if to feel the concrete floor under him. People want heroes, and here he was, his ageing, bloated, diseased body exposed as an offering to the audience, to the theatre he had served all his life, where he had tirelessly sought an ultimate truth. He read as if a live wire ran through him, tense as an arrow, never theatrical, driven by an intensity close to silence, an impulse that projected him inside speech itself: ‘This was what I had come in search of without being aware of it, this constant uninterrupted to-and-fro of voice, text and body, this dominion of life despite the nearness of death, the illness. He gave boundlessly, gave things to see, to hear in this epiphany. He gave its full scope to the word “reading”.’10 ‘La scène imaginaire de Patrice Chéreau’, a collective reading at the Odéon in March 2013, was dedicated to the

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texts that had mattered to him. The Sonnet ‘Th’expense of spirit’ chimed with Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer: ‘It wasn’t I who placed these two texts side by side’, he told the audience, but ‘they happen to meet in a strange place, sexuality, the experience of loneliness’ which was to be one of the evening’s leitmotifs, ‘the impossible encounter with the other: this sonnet has a special echo in Intimacy’.11 Clotilde Hesme read Sonnet 129, ‘in a waste of shame’, over-explicitly translated by JeanFrançois Peyrret as ‘dépense de semence’, followed by Desarthe with Sonnet 23, ‘an unperfect actor’, and Chéreau with Sonnet 20, ‘the master mistress of my passion’, the only personal statements of his own inclinations. Why he chose the Sonnets to represent Shakespeare that evening, rather than a dramatic speech, he did not say, but owned that his mind was on As You Like It, for which he felt ‘an infinite tenderness’, and had done very incompletely with students some thirty years before. He was preparing to stage it with two of the readers present – Clotilde Hesme was to be his Rosalind, Desarthe the Melancholy Jaques – a promise that death would cancel.12

Phèdre – father and son Chéreau had announced after the Shakespeare Fragments he was leaving the stage, then unexpectedly returned with a most unexpected author: Racine. He had never hidden his lack of taste for the French classical repertory, for the alexandrine’s ‘false, terrifying music’ bored into pupils’ brains, which he identified with moral order and Soviet-like tyranny. Molière’s Dom Juan, a play in prose, was his earliest and only attempt at the French classics so far. What made him want to direct Phèdre was an enigmatic decree pronounced by Moidele Bickel. After dressing his production of Koltès, she told him: ‘Now that you have done Solitude, you need to do Racine.’ Coming not from a French worshipper of Racine, but from a German outsider, it challenged him to transport Racine’s pure argumentative language into his own universe of pulsating

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sensuality, create emotion out of the play’s themes, ‘the repression of desire, the guilt of pleasure.’ According to Calvario, he chose Phèdre because it was Racine’s most difficult play, just as he had chosen Hamlet. And just as he had selected Dover Wilson’s book, he clung this time to Roland Barthes’ Sur Racine. Phaedra feels a fatality hanging over her; she dies of an unsated, hidden desire, haunted by the belief that it is a crime, and creates for herself an infernal circle. Hippolyte dies of having kept silent, because he too feels shame at the thought of desire. The son of Theseus, the world’s greatest seducer and killer of monsters, dreams of absolute purity. ‘This is where Phèdre meets Greek tragedy: we live in a world where fathers are stronger than sons, they kill them.’13 Chéreau was fascinated by the vitality of the Greek myths that Racine had summoned to a dialogue with his own century, and sought to make them speak again to ours, digging under Racine to hear Euripides and Seneca. Greek drama, he thought, was even closer to us than Shakespeare, for whom he professed ‘boundless admiration, through whom I feel I have learnt everything I know about the theatre, but who occasionally plunges into an era that seems less near to ours, there is more of a screen between Shakespeare and us’: Greek mythology, in which fathers kill and eat their children, is ‘more brutal and simpler, closer to our fears, to the ground we tread’. On their first reading at the table, more than the torments of the eponymous heroine, it was the tug of war between Thésée and his son that became the central focus, as it would in the actual performance: ‘here is a father whose only wish is to have his son destroyed, wiped out.’14 Though absent in Racine, Phèdre’s young son stood on stage to witness his mother’s confession and offering of herself to Hippolyte. Here, Chéreau did not turn a final ‘Yes’ into a ‘No’, but he did alter the balance of the play, digging under the verse to tap those primitive energies. Racine had added to his sources an unscripted character, Aricie, who loves Hippolyte and tempers the original character’s chastity. To make his Phèdre ‘less odious than the Ancients had painted her’, the playwright

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shifted the weight of her fault on to a servant, Œnone, who advises her to accuse Hippolyte, for he felt ‘calumny was something too low and too black to place in the mouth of such a virtuous princess’.15 But it is her feelings she believes criminal, Chéreau objects, she has committed no crime. Could he still create emotion with this strange uneventful story? His permanent doubt on the necessity of the theatre in today’s world resurfaced. His answer, do it differently, with new forms, new modes of representation, look for new authors or revitalize old ones, was again put to the test. Racine was Greek to him. To move audiences, he must break their habits, disturb their expectations, find a new space to invest, and invite in imaginary puissance. He had brought Shakespeare’s histories and the Conservatoire students to the Manufacture des Œillets, a disused industrial plant that had never hosted a show or any cultural adventure before.16 For Racine, he inaugurated Ateliers Berthier, an outbranch of the Odéon. His first use of a bifrontal stage had been in the improvised space of Munich for the performance of the Procès de Prague, a founding event echoed in the design of the Nanterre auditorium for Solitude. It now had his preference, and would again in his design for As You Like It. It was like a tennis court, keeping the public eye on a perpetual move, with the actors dangerously exposed, performing inches away from the first row of feet, making Racine’s language bleed under their eyes. To Dominique Blanc, playing Phèdre felt like performing in a bullfight, with no retreating space, no respite. In these surroundings, Peduzzi’s huge threshold, drawn from the Petra Urn Tomb, seemed part of a natural architecture, hardly noticeable as a set. Another surprise was that Chéreau, whose actresses often deplored his lack of interest for them in rehearsals, chose a play in which the female parts exceed the men’s, five to three. These were remnants of the Greek tragic chorus he found beautiful, and had already worked on in the Shakespeare Fragments. But instead of fusing them into one voice, he wanted five different types, and strove to make them fully

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audible, refusing to let Racine’s Phèdre cover the others. The duel of father and son was enhanced by an uncanny physical likeness between Pascal Greggory (Thésée) and Eric Ruf (Hippolyte). Ruf remembers his directions were summed up in two sentences that were like roof beams to the whole production. To Hippolyte: ‘You are the new ruler, your father returns, you are back to age 7’. To Thésée: ‘You come home, you have a problem, it has to be your son.’ In Ruf’s own experience, because everything revolves around a love scene that does not exist, for which the text offers no material, audiences tend to imagine that perhaps something did happen between stepmother and stepson. In both Euripides and Seneca, she accuses him of having raped her, but Racine makes her charge him only with planning such a design, to spare his Theseus a confusion that might make him less attractive. Here, the resemblance between father and son added strength to their confrontation, and barb to Phaedra’s confession: she loves Theseus, not the ‘volage adorateur de mille objets divers’ (‘Fickle worshipper of a thousand diverse ends’), ‘But the loyal, proud, even shy man, instead, / Charming, young, drawing after him all hearts.’ Her words, ‘He shared your bearing, your eyes, your speech,’ lend fuel to the confrontation of youth and age when the two men stand facing each other, with the son a dangerous if unwilling rival.17 Isabelle Adjani, who was to play Phèdre originally, suggested actors of the venerable house where she had made her own début. As members of the Comédie-Française, Michel Duchaussoy (Théramène) and Ruf were tacitly put in charge of the verse, to resist attempts at turning it into prose. The fight with the alexandrine was renewed every night.18 François Regnault, when consulted over the diction, had all his remonstrances brushed aside: ‘No, no, no, no, I don’t want to know the rules, what interests me is the thought.’19 Chéreau was ‘absolutely opposed to the stop at the caesura, after the sixth syllable, and absolutely opposed to stops at the end of each line.’ Regnault helped him out of the dilemma by providing a copy of the original 1677 text. Its punctuation had

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not suffered the standardized treatment of nineteenth-century editing, with additions of colons or semi-colons to mark the resting places, and allowed him more leeway, he felt, with the end-stopped line. A compromise was reached: the alexandrine was predominantly respected, but the actors were told to run on when meaning required they exceed its twelve syllables. When Œnone suggests to Phèdre her dreadful plot – ‘You fear him. Dare to accuse him first / Of the crime he would charge you with today’ – she must pronounce the whole sentence in one breath, not to obstruct its meaning. Chéreau demanded rapid, intense emotional and physical involvement, and dictated rhythms with alternating commands: ‘go on’, ‘slow down’. He lived every situation of the play, Ruf recalls, played each character to such an extent they all ended moving and looking like him, bull-like, head in the shoulders. His Shakespearian reading of Racine made him distrust the textual straightjacket actors carry in their head, an interior Racinian music that might drive them away from a simple, direct implication of the body. The famous ‘récit de Théramène’ reporting the death of Hippolyte is traditionally interpreted as a quintessential Racinian oratorio, but Chéreau wanted each bump of the ground over which his body is dragged, each tear of the flesh, to print itself on the audience’s imagination. He broke a major rule of French classicism by having the bloodied corpse shown on stage instead of keeping it in the wings as decorum required. This, an early decision, involved the making of a costly dummy that was visible only for seconds while brought down by a hand-worked elevator, then exchanged for the living gory body of Ruf/Hippolyte. Chéreau wanted to hear both the intimate music and the physical torture inflicted on an innocent young man. At the end of Théramène’s speech, in a mourning ritual, Thésée pressed his hands to the open wounds and slowly rubbed the blood over his face and skull. Classical alexandrine and decorum were not the only casualties. Again, the dénouement was cut short: off went the last four lines of the play and its only sign of appeasement, Thésée’s adoption of Aricie.

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Elektra – mother and daughters The idea of directing Richard Strauss’ Elektra arose in 2007, and slowly found its way to the stage. This opera, performed at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2013, would be Chéreau’s last production. Esa-Pekka Salonen immediately declared himself willing when approached by Clément Hervieu-Léger, and asked whether he would consider conducting the orchestra. Chéreau took longer to commit himself, being very ‘critical’ of the libretto. He objected mainly to the first scene where everyone shrieks from every part of the house, which he deemed impossible to stage. A day-by-day account of the rehearsals by a trainee dramaturg records in fine detail his reading of the text, direction of actor-singers, lighting, timing, motions of the sun, chorus, props, down to the last bucket left behind by the Servants.20 Chéreau’s main objection was to Elektra, who had taken on excessive weight in the opera, compared with the character designed by Aeschylus, which he preferred to Sophocles’. Central to the plot was the recognition scene with her brother, as Wagner well understood when he lifted it for his Act 1 of Die Walküre. In the Oresteia, Strauss’ main source, she is too scared to kill her mother; it is Orestes who must do it. In the libretto she harps on the theme of vengeance but she is unable to fulfil it. Yet Hofmannsthal made her an absolute heroine, creating tensions with the music. This was as absurd as making Hamlet an assassin.21 Waltraud Meier helped Chéreau over this obstacle with her reading of Klytämnestra, which brought food to his new perspective on the plot. When directing her in Isolde, he had come fully ‘armed’ against her experience of a part she had sung many times, knowing he would have to surprise and convince her with his directions. He found in her an ideal performer, a singer who, like Gwyneth Jones, was a born actress: ‘she acts, she listens, she trembles, she can be filmed while the tenor delivers his great aria, it is she you want to look at.’22 Discussing his production, Chéreau admitted being obsessed by the two centuries of plays preceding Hofmannsthal and

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Strauss, and by Hofmannsthal’s choice of the most barbarous, violent version of the myth. All these plays hammer home that the murder of the father must be revenged, that blood must be paid in blood, in an endless cycle of retaliation, but each version leaves out a part of the story; none tells you, for instance, what led Clytemnestra to murder her husband. All she says by way of explanation in Hofmannsthal’s version, written in 1903, is that she wants to understand and deliver herself from memories that haunt her: ‘Dreams that afflict us can be banished.’ Hofmannsthal had in his library first editions of Freud’s Studies in Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams. Next to Freud, Hamlet stood at the back of his inspiration, and was repeatedly compared with Elektra.23 Both score and libretto told a story Chéreau worked to bring under Shakespeare’s lens: ‘I can only narrate Elektra by referring to Hamlet’. More clearly than he ever had at the time he directed the play, he unfolded his reading of its wavering, procrastinating hero. The murder of Agamemnon, a beloved father like King Hamlet, keeps the disjointed family prisoners, devoured by their self-inflicted mourning: The hour approacheth, sacred to us twain, The very hour, when thou wert foully slaughtered, By her, thy queen, and him who now supplants thee, And on thy royal couch doth toy with her. Both Hamlet and Elektra express disgust at their mother’s sexuality. Part of Elektra, like Hamlet, conventionally agrees that the crime must be avenged; part of her wonders to what end. This may be stretching the parallel too far, one critic pointed out: Hamlet had the means but not the will, Elektra had the will but not the means.24 In Chéreau’s view, mourning does not become Elektra any more than it did his Hamlet: it is she who keeps the others locked up in endless, fruitless mourning. She who says, ‘Blessed is he who can his deed accomplish!’, but cannot perform the deed herself – like Hamlet,

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who could not quite understand nor execute the command to revenge his father, and ends dying himself. In Ad me ipsum, Hofmannsthal notes that ‘To act is to relinquish the self’, and adds this comment, ‘(The relationship of Elektra to action admittedly treated with irony. Elektra – Hamlet.) The decisive factor is not action but fidelity.’25 She may be, as Forsyth points out, ‘unflinching in her fidelity’, but Chéreau thought it wrong to give her pride of place, or see other characters through her eyes: her self-centred point of view is unfair to them, her hysteria should not contaminate the whole opera as directors sometimes allow her to do. Hence the ‘disastrous’ tradition that makes Chrysothemis a ninny because she would marry even a peasant to get out. ‘But what is wrong with wanting to lead a normal life, marry and have children? Isn’t that precisely in agreement with the ideology of the audience?’ That she should want to escape this mad house of mourning deserves respect. Because it is a short opera, without enough time for Elektra’s psychological development, Chéreau worked to fill in the gaps of her abrupt changes, construct a consistent tale out of the libretto. He refused the twilight atmosphere that usually prevails on stage, where characters drift in without being clearly identified. He chose instead to show them all in full daylight. The house may be eaten from inside, but its façade must look normal on the outside. Its unhappiness must not impregnate the set. There is no need of concrete walls to make a prison. All you need is to lock the doors. It is a tribute to Chéreau’s talent that stars of the first magnitude took on very minor parts for the excitement of singing again under his direction: Donald McIntyre, his former Wotan, to interpret the three lines of An Old Servant, and Franz Mazura (Günther, Dr Schön), Orest’s Tutor. Because, Mazura told Nussac, he had lived his greatest experiences of opera with Chéreau: no one had ever made them perform as he did. Though minor, these were significant parts, the stress being on the servants’ recognition of Orest before Elektra does, a point borrowed from Ulysses in the Odyssey: ‘the hounds in the courtyard know me well, / And mine own sister not?’ The

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opera opens with the Agamemnon motive, played fortissimo. If the father’s ghost hangs over the action, the musical rhythm is provided by a succession of female duets, between mother and daughter, between the sisters, with Adrianne Pieczonka and Evelyn Herlitzius completing a dream trio of splendid voices. Each character, including silent servants, contributed to the background choreography by measuring the degrees of tension, each given a specific part to play in the chorus. The interview in Aix, Chéreau’s last filmed one, evoked his struggle with the abrupt transitions of a central character who never leaves the stage, the tensions between score and dialogues, all ‘perplexities I will try to solve in the most fertile manner.’ It ended with this abstract of the aim at perfection and clarity that drove him: ‘Ce n’est pas encore résolu. Mais . . . on va y arriver’ (The problem is not quite solved yet. But . . . we will get there).

Comme il vous plaira – last Will and testament The project to do Macbeth ‘later, perhaps’ never materialized. Another moving forest had Chéreau’s preference, a comedy ‘born like Shakespeare’s great tragedies, in the throes of violence, dispossession, brotherly hatred and exile’. This forest will be ‘an enchanted or a wretched place, as you wish,’ he promised, ‘a dark place where to hide, survive, and learn what we least know how to do: love the other and live’, by exploring the sidetracks of love’s uncertainties. The aim, in this mysterious wilderness, was to explore ‘the crossed paths of sex, melancholy, depression, and lose oneself in them’, to ‘watch this Rosalind become under our eyes this desirable and disturbing young boy who will lead us through bush and briars to appeasements and reconciliations deemed impossible.’ The liberty of the forest would upset gender bars, throw caution and conventions to the wind, obstinately look for the path that leads to the

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other’s body. ‘To find one’s way in the forest is never easy: it is to understand the meaning, the direction of our lives.’26 Comme il vous plaira was cast and due to be performed at the Ateliers Berthier on Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, April 2014. In his presentation at the Odéon press release, Chéreau reminded the audience he had directed a performance of the play with the Nanterre pupils, but despite the graceful charm of the young actors, he had brought out only a small fraction of what the text required; ‘the play itself wasn’t there’. He had long been obsessed with As You Like It, which reminded him of La Dispute. The work on the text with his assistant Vincent Huguet began in August 2012. Desarthe and Rabourdin were recruited by phone calls in December. Desarthe thought at first it would be an all-male cast, but Chéreau, who had much enjoyed Declan Donnellan’s, was set on having a woman play his Rosalind, and equally set on having Clotilde Hesme make a convincing Ganymede: the two ‘men’ must be mutually attracted, and play all the upsets and turmoils of desire on a softer, more melancholy note than La Dispute. It was to be a play about healing breaches. Maybe he also had in mind a voyage of discovery for his cast. Each actor was treated to a private discussion of his part. Calvario would have loved to play Orlando, but the part was given to Vincent Dissez, and he was left with Silvius. Laurent Grevill was to play both Dukes. Rabourdin was given one piece of instruction: Oliver is not a villain, he truly suffers in the presence of Orlando, for reasons unknown, and must enter weighed down by this breach of brotherly love. At their first reading in one of the Odéon salons, around April 2013, Desarthe gave a flamboyant delivery of ‘All’s the world’s a stage’, but Chéreau wanted it more subdued, toned down: this Jaques must be more of a dreamer, halfabsent, who contemplates life from his seat under a tree. ‘Of course the production would have been full of stamina’, Calvario asserts, ‘but Patrice aimed to move towards greater sparseness, finer effects, kept in suspension, as it were.’ The mockup was ready. Chéreau and Peduzzi had arrived separately at the idea that the design would be a single tree,

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‘one to represent all the trees and all the forests in the world.’ Samples of leaves in all sizes, shapes and colours were soon brought in from the workshop. This tree, a huge leafy oak, would swiftly cross the stage on a track at the opening, then move back very slowly, almost invisibly, perhaps to the sound of music. It would be large enough for the actors to climb its branches, or hide behind it, echoing the characters’ attempts to hide from each other: all must lose themselves before they can meet others and find their own self. The bi-frontal set would have a slight runaway perspective. Chéreau’s stagings had grown increasingly stark with time, increasingly governed by his and Peduzzi’s mantra, Less is more. In his last years, he stripped himself of all trappings, as if reaching for perfect nudity, fighting illness and working strenuously to the very end. While rehearsing I Am the Wind in London he had been in and out of the hospital every day. A fortnight before his death, he went line by line over the text of As You Like It with Bonnefoy, who found him very tired but fully concentrated, and determined to elucidate each word. The work on the text was as thorough as usual. For over a year, alternating with rehearsals of Elektra, Chéreau and Vincent Huguet pored over two English editions and all the French translations they could lay their hands on, with an original preference for Supervielle’s, selecting the best phrases in each version, creating their own puns. Eventually they fell back on Bonnefoy’s version but kept the freedom to make punctual changes. There would be no return to the court after the protagonists’ flight and the first three acts were restructured accordingly: once the characters have left, they all remain, meet and eventually unite in the forest. The escapes, the Duke’s commands to hunt the escapees, Oliver’s banishment all follow in quick succession before Rosalind and Celia reach the forest, thus allowing more time for Rosalind to transform into a boy. Orlando was to arrive there at dusk, with a reminder of La Dispute, ‘seven dawns, seven dusks’: dinner is being prepared at the court in exile, where formal ceremony is kept up by modest means, ‘le faste sans le faste, a rug, a brasero, candles’,

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and the Duke, like Napoleon at Saint-Helena, dines in his dress uniform. Huguet’s annotated typescripts bear numerous marks of pentimento.27 Some speeches were intensively reworked, especially Touchstone’s and Jaques’, whose puns Chéreau greatly enjoyed retranslating himself. Through their joint efforts, Jaques made fun of Orlando’s witty answers with ‘Vous avez dû enfiler des femmes de bijoutiers pour sortir ce genre de perles’, punning on enfiler (make necklaces/fuck jewellers’ wives). They also took much trouble over Ovid’s goats and Goths. Some, not all, of Bonnefoy’s euphuisms were ignored. The overprecious ‘votre ramagé’ for ‘come, warble’ was replaced by ‘gazouillez’ (chirp), the medieval ‘messire’ by ‘monsieur’, ‘douaire’ by ‘héritage’, ‘équanimité’ by ‘patience’, ‘mon extrace’ by ‘ma naissance’. Ganymede’s ‘pourpoint et haut de chausse’, the exact equivalent of ‘doublet and hose’, gave way to a ‘veste et pantalon’ closer to common streetwear than courtly Renaissance costumes. William would not be Guillaume but remain William, in tribute to Shakespeare’s ‘fair name’. There were hesitations over ‘Ducdame’, with the last choice in favour of Bonnefoy’s ‘Eh bien, qu’il vienne, Etienne.’ His ‘couplet’ was changed to ‘stanza’, then the original ‘stanzo’ was restored. ‘Et plus de dents, plus d’yeux, plus de goût pour rien ni plus rien’ grew closer to the English: ‘Sans dents, sans yeux, sans goût, sans rien.’ Much care was given to Touchstone’s retreat ‘not with bag and bagage, yet with scrip and scrippage’, appending Bonnefoy’s ‘nos cliques et leurs claques’ to Supervielle’s ‘armes et bagages’, with a choice of variants in marginal notes, ‘nos clics et nos clacs’, ‘sacs et contenages’, a barbarism coined to rhyme with ‘bagage’, and in the last Odéon script, a pencilled ‘notre sac et son contenage’. Worlds could be reduced to words, and Bonnefoy’s translation of ‘A motley fool – a miserable world’ by ‘Ah, monde pitoyable’ become ‘Un fou. Mais quel pauvre mot.’ Touchstone’s seven causes of quarrel were cut, along with most of the songs, for reasons of economy possibly, though perhaps not finally: ‘Who doth ambition shun’ is restored in the last script, to be sung ‘a capella’ by the four men. Other

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smaller cuts erased inconsistencies about Rosalind’s height or the assertion that she is beloved of her uncle, references to motley, doublet and hose that might clash with the actual costumes, information about characters’ entrances, moods or attitudes that the closeness of the Berthier space would make redundant, or the misogynist reference to a man’s horns as ‘the dowry of his wife – ’tis none of his own getting.’ Hymen’s Song, the Duke’s final cue and the dance also disappeared, leaving the last word to Jaques’ ‘no pastime’. In his advice to Chéreau, Bonnefoy insisted on Rosalind’s free speech. Her idiom is not that of a young maid. Shakespeare wants her to have a more complex femininity than is admitted in society; she is part of a ‘programme for a renewal of the feminine in Shakespeare’s theatre’ with Desdemona and Cleopatra. She is resolved to face all aspects of sexuality, as her ambiguous relation with Phebe indicates, although she represses it with cruel words. Her choice of Ganymede for a pseudonym is not random: as Bonnefoy’s Preface states, an Elizabethan audience would know that young boys lending themselves to homosexual practices were called ‘ganymedes’.28 The poet must have learnt from the experience over Ophelia’s songs, for his translation pays extra care to all sexual puns and erotic innuendoes. He suspects many, and sometimes makes them more explicit than the original. Thus Touchstone’s wooing of a peascod becomes far more bawdy than in English, ‘kissing’ translated by ‘je baisais’ (I fucked), ‘weeping tears’ by ‘tout en déchargeant des sanglots’ (discharge tears). ‘Cleanse the foul body’ is glossed in a footnote with ‘Of venereal diseases, of course.’29 Jaques catches the ‘assuredly obscene’ underlying meaning of ‘honey a sauce to sugar’, although it ‘escapes today’s commentators’.30 Handwritten notes on the typescripts indicate early lines of direction. Though a comedy, the play begins like a history, with a fierce wrestling match that gives the opening its oppressive tone. Orlando fights with the energy of despair since he has nothing to lose; the fight is over in seconds, and there is no suspense but a complete reversal – Charles the wrestler lies on the ground before he knows where he is. Making him a Turk, as

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Peter Stein had done in 1977–8, was a ‘false solution’. All the victims of Duke Frederick meet in the forest, both a desert to be (re)peopled and a place where they are schooled, all making one group at the end. Unnamed ‘Others’ attend the philosophical exchanges of Touchstone and Corin. Phebe enters with Corin and Silvius, then exits when Silvius calls ‘Oh Phebe Phebe’, followed by Rosalind’s cue ‘Alas, poor shepherd’, thus creating an early link between the two women. At various points the stage direction Exeunt is suppressed. At the end of 3.4 they were all ‘about to leave but Silvius and Phebe walk past under their noses so they stay’. The various encounters in the forest receive much attention and rewriting, like Jaques’ account of his meeting with a fool, Orlando’s rough breaking in on the Duke’s dinner, or the critical reactions to his verse. Supervielle’s version of ‘Why should this a desert be’ makes Orlando a far better poet than Bonnefoy’s sententious rhymer who extends the original hepta- and octosyllables into blank lines of ten or twelve, but Bonnefoy’s version was retained, supporting his point that these are empty maxims. On stage, it will be a very long poem, spread over three pages that Celia will scan methodically. All copies to be collected at the end of the scene by Touchstone, who will drop some and pick them up for further reading in the forest. A note to the debate on the evils of rural life specifies that Touchstone is ‘en train de trimballer des cartons’ (carrying cardboard boxes). Like him, Chéreau was moving houses, no longer able to climb the stairs of rue de Braque, and got rid of innumerable books in the transfer, but kept Starobinski’s L’Encre de la mélancolie on a side table as his ‘livre de chevet’. Its title, drawn from a rondeau by the medieval poet Charles d’Orléans, lent its colour to his reading of the play. In Sonnet 65, ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright’, through the metamorphosis of the melancholy humour into ink, love is allowed still to shine bright in the writing of the poem: ‘The most opaque darkness opposes to light a surface from which it leaps back, Lucifer-like, as if from a second source.’31 Starobinski compares Jaques to Molière’s misanthropic Alceste, both admirable representatives of satirists turned into

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satiric butts. Shakespeare uses his character’s own words, ‘The wise man’s folly is anatomized / Even by the squandering glances of the fool’, to dissect his black humour: ‘The only privilege Jaques wants to recover from the fool is his freedom of speech, the licence to tell in plain terms the most wounding truth, the right to practise satire: converted into offensive gall, the melancholy belligerence that was aimed at first against the self, makes an about-turn and strikes at the world.’ A ‘malcontent traveller’ in his youth, Jaques now stubbornly excludes himself from the happy conclusion, betraying a shameful inability to live and to love. His admirable speech runs through all the ages from childhood to senility like a film in fast forward mode. This puts Starobinski in mind of phenomenologists like Erwin Straus or Ludwig Binswanger, who observe that melancholy slows down the subject’s internal rhythm. The gap between his own tempo and that of ordinary reality makes the world flow before his eyes like a theatrical show, too rapid and fugitive for him to take part. Jaques brushes against the other characters, never confronts them, never affects the movement of the plot. He loves no one, and no one needs him: ‘He is in the play a superfluous and sour musician. A wanderer on the forest paths, he will remain forever captive there, being part of the scenery more than he takes part in the action: isn’t the shade of the forest an intangible melancholy?’ Jaques is full of affectations, ‘a conformist in states of discontent and loneliness.’ What he watches is a pageant of shadows.32 The typescript notes show two ‘stars’ competing for centre stage in the forest, Jaques and Touchstone. Bonnefoy’s mistranslation of ‘pride’ by ‘luxure’ at 2.7.70 suggested to Chéreau that Jaques is ‘like an early sketch for Hamlet’: he wants to borrow the Fool’s motley and denounces lust. Perhaps this unscripted link inspired the phone call offering the part to Desarthe, after years of silence. Jaques’ first meeting with Touchstone fills him with joy, but pleasure soon gives way to indignant anger at hypocrisy, while his speech on the seven ages bears ‘the infinite sadness of an old man’. Both wits were

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to be superseded by Rosalind. Clotilde Hesme must look like a ‘petit mec’, a wholly convincing little guy, without the least hint that Orlando sees through her disguise. It is Ganymede whose offer of marriage he accepts, Chéreau insists; what we see on the set is Orlando marrying a boy. That this boy plays the part of Rosalind makes no difference: ‘she is both (apart from the fact that she feels far more at ease under the identity of Ganymede) . . .’ Here he disagrees with his mentor. Bonnefoy thinks that Shakespeare gives more indications of Rosalind’s femininity as we near the dénouement, that Celia is tired of her disguise and wants Oliver to see her as herself, that after Rosalind fainted Orlando would know who she is: ‘Perhaps he always knew.’33 But to Chéreau, the whole play hinges on the assumption that Orlando does not recognize her: ‘if he suspects, be it only for one second, the whole thing turns into a game. And it is not a game.’34 Where Bonnefoy gave the game away, by translating ‘cousin’ and ‘magician’ with French feminines, Chéreau preserves Rosalind’s masculine disguise to the end.35 While Chéreau was working with Bonnefoy, over lunch they had a long conversation about the meaning of the play. He had read Bonnefoy’s new essay on Orlando furioso, which suggests that Shakespeare probably knew the recent English translation from L’Ariosto: after weighing the disastrous effect of the dreamer’s self-illusionment, the playwright invented an Orlando who could be cured.36 Possibly convinced by this theory, ‘Patrice meant to treat the play at more or less this level. We had also discussed the strange relation, provocative, aggressive, seductive between a Rosalind who is both boy and girl and the cruel shepherdess who makes her poor boyfriend suffer. A piece wholly devoted, this comedy, to demystifying the consciousness of the self.’ Bonnefoy felt their meetings gave them both food for thought, but if Chéreau evolved at all, it was a wholly personal interior process: ‘I never taught him anything that he did not already know or feel.’ The main gist of their exchanges was over shades of meaning, nuances. ‘He was quite unconcerned, at that stage at least, by the needs or constraints of a performance. Well, only occasionally.’ They were reading

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the translation of As You Like It when Chéreau chanced upon the word ‘épithalame’: no one in the audience would understand it, he said. ‘But I objected that Shakespeare had employed a no less difficult word, and he agreed.’ Épithalame remained in the next script, only to be cut in the last. Yet Bonnefoy’s influence went far beyond such pin-point erudition, Huguet confirms: his preface to the play, the idea of a Rosalind firmly teaching a moonstruck young man what it is really to love, deeply moved Chéreau, who thought by then that many things needed mending in his personal affective life, and that his illness might be a reflection of the pains he had endured or inflicted upon others. To Bonnefoy, it was the melancholy humour of this alleged comedy that especially attracted Chéreau: ‘it agreed with his own, which was constantly worsening, fully visible now in this last phase of his life, even in friendly conversations filled with generous mirth. And I believe he would have shown it well, by stressing, for instance, Shakespeare’s brief clues to Rosalind’s sexual inclinations’; clearly she is not insensitive to Phebe’s pressing advances. Brief notes in the text suggest that ‘no matter how lucid she may be when faced with Orlando’s idealisations, she does not truly know herself, nor is she master of her own destiny.’ Drama to Bonnefoy represented the brutal, iconoclastic intrusion of reality into the recesses of the self where poetry is often tempted to withdraw. The theatre, a form of ‘poetry critical of poetry’, deconstructs its dreams and illusions. Shakespeare’s own engagement with the stage, after writing two long poems, shows a will to rid formal poetry of its painted shreds and patches, reopen it to the lively truth of the spoken word, the truth of real life. With Shakespeare’s lucid awareness of his own tricks, poetry is no longer simply the expression of a buried truth but a resolute operation on the outside world, a will determined to mend the loss of hope. It is through the theatre that Orlando will be cured of bad poetry by a Rosalind freed from decorum thanks to her ambiguous costume: ‘Deal! Here the treatment begins, and will develop, like a psychoanalysis

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of our own time, in nothing but speech: an attempt to dissipate chimeric representations through thoughtful work over the use of words.’37 Three generations of actors were to collaborate on this tantalizing As You Like It. The choice of play was therapeutic, Huguet believes; a struggle against depression, a fight for survival. It was Shakespeare’s unique quality that he had something to offer to every age. Part of the cure against black humour was the presence in the project of a cheerful group of young actors provided by the Jeune Théâtre National, which co-produced. Balancing Jaques’ melancholy, the strength of their desires, the ruthless vitality of love found an unexpected source in Jan Kott. His Shakespeare our Contemporary, whose grand staircase of history had failed to convince the young director of Richard II, now found new meaning as a token of restored friendship when Luc Bondy offered it to Chéreau, who then gave one copy to each member of the cast, telling them to read the chapter on ‘Bitter Arcadia’. Nostalgia and melancholy were but an entrance to a stage that Rosalind, Audrey, and the young team would have filled with promise under Chéreau’s avid, expectant eyes.

9 Chéreau’s Heirs

‘C’est Shakespeare qu’ils n’aiment pas’: it is Shakespeare they don’t like, Simone de Beauvoir diagnosed, when the critics tore to pieces Charles Dullin’s King Lear after the Second World War; their attacks on the production revealed a deep-seated dislike for the poet.1 A reverse movement was initiated two years later, when Jean Vilar began to convert the Avignon public to Shakespeare, to reach new heights in the 1960s with the enormous success of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary. After centuries of a love/hate relation with writers, artists and audience, Shakespeare has been for the past decades France’s most frequently performed playwright, overtaking Molière, under an ample variety of unequally talented directors. French Shakespeare since the romantics was the emblem of rebellion against all forms of classicism and political oppression, allowing free range to the most daring creations. It produced masterpieces, and displays of self-destructive narcissism. Where iconoclasm, deconstruction, and sheer ignorance sometimes dominated the stage, Chéreau brought to the theme his distinctive touch, elegant style, cold stylized violence, sensitive management of actors, and his idiosyncratic but rarely equalled attention to the text. His Hamlet, supported by Desarthe’s brilliant interpretation, an apocalyptic ghost, players in modern dress who looked like poor immigrants among the rich costumes, and Peduzzi’s inspired provocative ‘underground’ set, remains a landmark among the most

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memorable French interpretations of the play. But by then Shakespeare had been for years France’s most popular playwright, and Chéreau’s Hamlet did not alter the movement of theatrical history as his radical Richard II had in 1970, months before Peter Brook’s Dream crossed the Channel, and Mnouchkine’s 1789 opened the Cartoucherie. Other memorable productions of the 1960s had recently rocked the French stage: the Living Theater, Luca Ronconi’s Orlando furioso, Arnold Wesker’s Kitchen heated up by Mnouchkine, Les Paravents, Béjart’s choreographies. Under the leadership of Romain Bouteille the collective Café de la Gare gathered an impressive number of future stars – Coluche, Miou-Miou, Patrick Dewaere, Renaud, Rufus, Depardieu, to name a few – and attracted young in-the-know crowds with their slogan, ‘C’est moche, c’est sale, c’est dans le vent’ – it’s ugly, it’s dirty, it’s in – but no major Shakespeare event since Planchon’s Henry IV in 1959. Françoise Sagan, Sartre and Duras ruled the stage. Shakespeare usually marked the acme of a director’s career, after years of maturation. Vitez, for one, had directed Molière and Racine, Goethe, Claudel, Chekhov, Brecht, Gogol, and was manager of the Théâtre de Chaillot when he staged his first Shakespeare – Hamlet – at age 53. In 1968 Mnouchkine did a production of Dream, drawn straight from Freud and Jan Kott’s ‘Bitter Arcadia’, then waited over a decade before she launched her ambitious project, Les Shakespeare. The cycle, which was to include the second Henriad and two comedies, Twelfth Night and Love’s Labour’s Lost, was cut short after three plays by the defection of her Falstaff, Philippe Hottier. She did not feel mature enough to tackle tragedies like Lear or Hamlet that were already overcast by famous images from film or stage productions. Like some of her illustrious elders, from Copeau to Vilar, she vowed to enter ‘as an apprentice in the workshop of a master, hoping to learn there how to play the world on a stage’.2 Peter Brook had behind him a long experience and the aura of the Royal Shakespeare Company when his Dream came to Paris.

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Then Richard II made young Chéreau notorious, and in his wake the next generation rushed onto the breach throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Lavaudant, who would succeed Chéreau at Villeurbanne, directed a King Lear in 1975, followed two years later by La Rose et la Hache, a preparatory sketch for his Richard III in 1983. Mesguich gave the first of his five (so far) Hamlets in 1977. While Peter Stein led an experimental Shakespeare’s Memory I & II at the Schaubühne, in preparation for his As You Like It (1976 and 1977), Denis Llorca drew an unprecedented nine-hour saga, Kings, from the Henry VI trilogy. At the onset of the 1980s, Shakespeare’s popularity was such that the television channel France 3 broadcast the complete sequence of BBC films on Sunday afternoons over several years. There was no turning back after that. Along with Les Amandiers and La Cartoucherie, the major theatres presented some of their most memorable creations: Peter Brook opened the Bouffes-du-Nord with Timon d’Athènes (1974) and Mesure pour Mesure (1978), Strehler staged La Tempesta at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe (1983), Matthias Langhoff a Roi Lear (TNS and MC 93 Bobigny, 1986). The ComédieFrançaise slowly but strongly followed suit with Ronconi’s Marchand de Venise (1987), Jorge Lavelli’s Songe d’une nuit d’été (1988) and Lluis Pasqual’s Comme il vous plaira (1989). In 1990, Parisians were treated to three versions of Titus Andronicus, directed by Deborah Warner, Peter Stein and Daniel Mesguich. In 1994, two Hamlets were in competition: one, Lavaudant’s with Andrzej Seweryn at the ComédieFrançaise, the other, Terry Hands’ with Francis Huster at Espace Pierre Cardin. In his anathemas against the English barbarian, Voltaire had opposed the quality of Racinian silence – ‘Mais tout dort, et l’armée, et les vents, et Neptune’ – to the coarse ‘Not a mouse stirring’ of Hamlet.3 To Stendhal, denouncing the Parisian philistines who recently exposed their chauvinism, Shakespeare stood for everything that Racine was not, and that French drama urgently needed.4 Chéreau made his point by injecting

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Shakespeare into his version of Phèdre. Now Ruf, administrator of the Comédie-Française, maintains that ‘Chéreau is Shakespearian’: being so, he breached a gap in the French theatre, which suffers from a persistent division between body and mind – a split echoed in the divisions of public and private theatres, high and low brow; one dedicated to serious thought and civic political commitment, the other to pleasurable but slightly shamefaced entertainment. Shakespeare should be kept simple, Chéreau felt, not made more complex with exterior trappings. His own commitment, as he often said, was to tell the story properly, a lesson Ruf remembered when directing Romeo and Juliet. He found Chéreau at once animal and cerebral, an incredible mix of pure emotion, impulses, knowledge, instinct, violence and calm, gravity and lightness, listening only to his interior voices but consistently wary of falling in the traps of his own experience. His electric, animal manner of directing was a ‘fascinating non method’. It was impossible to detect which part of him led, which – brain, heart or flesh – gave out his instructions to the actors. He did not carry this French disease of division, but held together form and matter. The gap remains wide open today, despite so many exercises in acting schools designed to mend it, occasionally filled by foreign visitors like Thomas Ostermeier or Ivo van Hove, who is a declared admirer of Chéreau’s work. All three artists, like no others, ‘manage to reunite the North and South Korea of French theatre’.5 On the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s death, speaking at the British Embassy in the very room where Berlioz was married to Harriet Smithson, Ruf paid tribute to the lessons he had learnt from Chéreau’s Shakespearian inspiration. It is under this aegis that he organized a special celebration at the Comédie-Française on Shakespeare’s anniversary. The actors gathered on stage around the poet’s bust (a ritual so far reserved for Molière), after a birthday performance of Roméo et Juliette.6 Podalydès’s Album Shakespeare for the prestigious Pléiade edition recalls among his most memorable landmarks the entrance of Hamlet’s ghost in the Avignon night, confirming

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its place in the national theatre of the mind.7 Chéreau’s shadow hovered around the seventieth anniversary of the Avignon Festival in July 2016, his name associated with diverse works attempting to conjugate horror and beauty in their obstinate struggles with today’s reality. Krystian Lupa’s devotion to Thomas Bernhardt was measured by the yardstick of Chéreau’s to Koltès.8 After a workshop of several weeks at the nearby Chartreuse, Thierry Thieû Niang made thirteen schoolchildren dance the unspeakable in Au cœur, a production haunted by the photos of exiled children who had drowned in the Mediterranean. Robert Wilson directed Mikhail Baryschnikov in Letter to a Man, drawn from Nijinski’s notebooks. If Chéreau wanted Hervieu-Léger as assistant on Gabrielle, Tristan und Isolde, and Rêve d’automne, it was to show him ‘how he worked in the three modes of expression, but also make me understand he remained the same man and did the same job in the cinema, the theatre and the opera’.9 What they all understood, and various critics missed when they called Chéreau an aesthete, is that his images must always be pregnant with a story, a violent and erotic tale held as a mirror to our suffering nature. Now his most famous heir, Ivo van Hove, revisits Visconti’s Götterdammerung, Chéreau’s inspiration in Richard II, with Hervieu-Léger playing the part of Günther von Essenbeck in Les Damnés. Just as young Chéreau did on going to Berlin, young van Hove used his meagre pocket money to travel to Nanterre, where he saw every version of Dans la solitude several times. They share the same library of authors, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Duras, Heiner Müller and Koltès, of filmmakers, Bergman, Visconti, Welles. Van Hove particularly admires Chéreau’s treatment of choruses and ensemble work. The Flemish director is renowned for creating memorably beautiful images but, like his ‘idol’, wants them rigorously based on text. As with Chéreau, the process involves a fair amount of personal interpretation. It was during the performances of his Roman Tragedies that he read Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, and soon determined to turn it into a play. The project took

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four years to mature, two more to materialize. The duellists of Hamlet had practised under a fencing master; now the actor interpreting Howard Roark took drawing lessons for months to learn the genuine gesture of the architect. The play’s continuity with Coriolanus stood out clearly in the symbolic duel between its two versions of the artist: one rigidly individualistic, who rejects any form of compromise, one more socially inclined, who adapts to the current fashion and public taste. Right-wing Rand unequivocally stood for the reckless hero, her ‘ideal man’, but van Hove played up the tensions between artist and citizen. While sharing the urge to produce an ideally perfect work of art, he gave equal strength to the plea for the needs of social man: ‘The ambition of being absolutely authentic is important, but as citizens, it is important to live together.’ The eight hundred pages of The Fountainhead had been progressively reduced to a hundred and fifty. The actors were not consulted when he and his team cut a further twenty-five pages days before the premiere, but they had learnt to trust him and knew it was all for the good of the production, he confidently told his interviewer: ‘You have to kill your darlings, scenes you liked in rehearsals but see now are unnecessary to create a true emotion in the audience.’10 What matters is the story you want to tell, and that is always based on a text, on the characters and ideas of a text: visual ideas, images are not enough. The themes dealt with in these stories concern us today, van Hove insists as Chéreau had, when Europe grows increasingly liberal and governments tend to disappear. The massive presence of technology on stage shows the disease turning viral. In Kings of War, Richard of Gloucester telephoned Obama and Putin before he seized the crown. The play, an abstract of Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III, ‘existed somewhere between a dynastic family soap opera in which the country is carved up over afternoon tea, and a coolly forensic examination of leadership and power’.11 The family soap went further in his production with the Comédie-Française of Les Damnés, drawn from Visconti’s screenplay. Telling images –

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Reichstag fire, autodafés of Thomas Mann’s and Stefan Zweig’s books, Dachau camp – were projected on the huge wall of Avignon. Van Hove treated the Night of the Long Knives, like Chéreau had the Saint Bartholomew massacre, as one oversized sexual orgy. Like him he relentlessly questions the violence of the world, the violence of sex and its consummation of bodies to the first or last blood. Many shuddered and turned round to see who had joined in when a chorus of Nazi songs filled the Cour d’honneur. All were reminded of the recent Paris shootings as they watched the last heir of the rich industrial family fire his machine gun directly on the audience. But where Chéreau constantly invented as he went and expected the actors to develop his suggestions, there is no room for improvisation on van Hove’s set; everything is kept under strict control. Chéreau’s legacy to the art world has been abundantly discussed in various conferences and radio programmes, like ‘Génération(s) Chéreau’ organized in March 2014 by the Sorbonne Institut d’Etudes théâtrales. A major homage was paid to him by Collection Lambert and IMEC with an exhibition entitled ‘Patrice Chéreau, un musée imaginaire’, where work notes, sketches, filmed interviews, and videos of performances appeared with some of his favourite paintings, by Géricault, Goya, La Tour, Delacroix, Francis Bacon, Picasso, Giacometti, his father Jean-Baptiste, and Renoir’s portrait of his great-grandmother, Lise à l’ombrelle.12 Despite severe lacunae, like the quasi-absence of Shakespeare, it was on the whole uncritically applauded, though a blunt indictment by Mediapart accused the gallerist Yvon Lambert of drawing on public emotion to raise funds: €50,000 were needed from the generous lovers of Chéreau to bring over the required masterpieces. For €10 you could have your name engraved on a wall, for 200 an invitation to a private viewing, and so on, up to 2,000 or more.13 The art historian Frodon best summed up the mixed feelings raised by an exhibition he thought ‘Awesome, strange, irritating, and in the final count, exhilarating’.14 The latest and certainly not the last tribute, the 2016 session of

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Festival d’Automne honoured his memory with various events held at the Odéon, Les Amandiers and the Cinémathèque, while a three-day conference at the Sorbonne entitled ‘Patrice Chéreau en son temps’ brought together former collaborators and scholars for an overall review of his professional biography. Two years ago the Opéra Bastille revived De la maison des morts (18 Nov.–2 Dec. 2017), with a poster showing the flight of the eagle over the prison. In the numerous interviews of artists that followed Chéreau’s death, many declared a filial relationship with the director: Vincent Pérez, ‘Patrice Chéreau, the father I had chosen for myself’; Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, ‘He was a sort of father to me in my work, I feel like an orphan to-day and I know I am not the only one’; or ‘Bruno Todeschini, heir of Patrice Chéreau’.15 In a revival of Les Visages et les Corps, Calvario appeared to a reviewer ‘without any hint of pathos, so “inhabited” by the artist that there are moments when he looks like him’.16 Hervieu-Léger learnt from him how to make the body exist on stage: ‘In ten incredible years, Chéreau taught me my job, taught me my life’, he testified while directing Le Misanthrope at the Comédie-Française.17 The bodies of his Célimène and Alceste spoke as of their own impulse, vibrating with erotic desire, suggesting to a moved audience they were ideally made for each other if only they could reach some common ground of understanding. The filmmaker Arnaud Despléchin, a former student of IDHEC who, like many cinephiles of his generation, had no time for the theatre, remembered the shock of seeing Chéreau’s Hamlet: it made him feel he must start his studies all over again, see every Chéreau production after that, and end by directing Strindberg’s Père for the Comédie-Française at Ruf’s invitation.18 This Hamlet was the best show he had seen for years: ‘All of a sudden I saw totally possessed, disturbing performances . . . An intense vibration. Those people gave absolutely everything they had. For me this was no longer theatre but film. I was experiencing again all I loved about the American cinema.’19 Isabelle Huppert, who played the title role in Gabrielle, recalled Wittgenstein’s words in her tribute to

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FIGURE 4 Patrice Chéreau rehearsing Botho Strauss’s Le Temps et la Chambre at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, 1991. Photo © Ros Ribas/collection Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.

Chéreau the Malcontent: ‘After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life looks well-rounded through a haze. For him, however, it was not-well-rounded, but jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation.’20 To Hervieu-Léger, Patrice ‘said, and truly thought, that he was the sum total of the people he worked with, those he had met, that they too had made him. Of course this worked both ways. He was able to unite them all, he was the orchestra leader.’21

Appendix 1 Chronology of Main Productions

1964: 1965: 1966: 1967:

1968: 1969: 1970:

1971: 1972: 1973:

L’Intervention, Victor Hugo, Groupe Théâtral du lycée Louis-le-Grand Fuenteovejuna, Lope de Vega, Louis-le-Grand L’Héritier de village, Marivaux, Louis-le-Grand L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine, Labiche, Festival de Gennevilliers, Théâtre des Trois-Baudets Les Soldats, Jakob Lenz, prix du Concours des Jeunes Compagnies La Neige au milieu de l’été and Le Voleur de femmes de Guan Hanqing Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir, Dimítris Dimitriádis, Théâtre de la Commune, Aubervilliers, Théâtre de Sartrouville L’Italiana in Algeri, Rossini, with Thomas Schippers, Spoleto Dom Juan, Molière, Théâtre du Huitième, Lyon Richard II, Shakespeare, Gymnase, Marseille. Odéon, Paris Splendore e Morte di Joaquin Murieta, Pablo Neruda, Piccolo Teatro, Milan Toller, Scene di una rivoluzione tedesca, Tankred Dorst, Piccolo Teatro La Finta Serva, Marivaux, Festival des Deux Mondes, Spoleto Lulu, Wedekind, Piccolo Teatro Le Massacre à Paris, Marlowe, TNP Villeurbanne Toller, Scene di una rivoluzione, revived TNP Villeurbanne La Dispute, Marivaux, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris

198 APPENDIX 1: CHRONOLOGY OF MAIN PRODUCTIONS

1974: 1975: 1976:

1977:

1978: 1979: 1980:

1981: 1983:

1984:

1985: 1986: 1987:

1988:

1992:

Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Offenbach, with Georges Prêtre, Opéra de Paris Lear, Edward Bond, TNP Villeurbanne La Chair de l’orchidée, film La Dispute, 2, TNP Villeurbanne Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 2 Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner, with Pierre Boulez, Bayreuth Loin d’Hagondange, Jean-Paul Wenzel, Théâtre de la PorteSaint-Martin, Paris Der Ring, 2 Les Contes d’Hoffman, 3 Der Ring, 3 Lulu, Alban Berg, with Boulez, Opéra de Paris Der Ring, 4 Le Procès de Prague, Munich Les Contes d’Hoffman, 4 Der Ring, 5 Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen, TNP Villeurbanne. Théâtre de la Ville, Paris Combat de nègre et de chiens, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Amandiers, Nanterre Les Paravents, Jean Genet, Amandiers L’Homme blessé, film Lucio Silla, Mozart, with Sylvain Cambreling, Scala de Milan, Amandiers Comme il vous plaira, La Nuit des rois, Beaucoup de bruit pour rien, Peines d’amour perdues, Shakespeare, Amandiers school Quartett, Heiner Müller, Amandiers La Fausse Suivante, Marivaux, Amandiers Quai Ouest, Koltès, Amandiers Dans la solitude des champs de coton, Koltès, Amandiers Platonov, Chekhov, Amandiers Hôtel de France, film Hamlet, Shakespeare, Festival d’Avignon, Amandiers, La Villette Le Retour au désert, Koltès, Théâtre Renaud-Barrault, Paris Wozzeck, Alban Berg, with Daniel Barenboim, Théâtre du Châtelet Paris. Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin

APPENDIX 1: CHRONOLOGY OF MAIN PRODUCTIONS 199

1994:

1995: 1996: 1998:

2000: 2003: 2005: 2007:

2008: 2009: 2010:

2011: 2013:

Don Giovanni, Mozart, with Barenboim, Salzburg Festival Wozzeck, 2 La Reine Margot, film Dans la solitude des champs de coton, 2, Manufacture des Œillets, Ivry-sur-Seine. Odéon Don Giovanni, 2 Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments), Shakespeare, Conservatoire, Manufacture des Œillets, Ivry-sur-Seine Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, film Intimacy, film Phèdre, Racine, Odéon-Ateliers Berthier Gabrielle, film De la maison des morts, Leoš Janácˇek, with Boulez, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence Tristan und Isolde, Wagner, with Barenboim, Scala de Milan La Douleur, Marguerite Duras, with Thierry Thieû Niang, Amandiers Coma, Pierre Guyotat, reading dir. Thieû Niang, Odéon La Nuit juste avant les forêts, Koltès, with Thieû Niang, musée du Louvre Rêve d’automne, Jon Fosse, musée du Louvre I Am the Wind, Jon Fosse, Young Vic, London. Théâtre de la Ville, Paris Elektra, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, with Esa-Pekka Salonen, Aix-en-Provence

Appendix 2 List of People Cited

ADJANI , Isabelle, actress, played the title role in La Reine Margot. AMSTUTZ , Roland (1942–97), actor, performed in Toller, Peer Gynt, Hamlet and Hôtel de France. ANGLADE , Jean-Hugues, actor, Charles IX in La Reine Margot, performed in L’Homme blessé, Persécution. ANGRÉMY , Jean-Pierre (1937–2010), writer under the pen name Pierre-Jean Rémy, diplomat, executive director of the Theatre department at the Ministry of Culture from 1979 to 1981. ATTOUN , Lucien, stage director, radio producer, critic, founder of Théâtre ouvert, artistic adviser of Strehler at Théâtre de l’Europe from 1983 to 1990. BACHARACH , Corinne, communications officer at Les Amandiers from 1982 to 1986. BANU , Georges, French-Romanian historian of the theatre. BARENBOIM , Daniel, pianist, conductor, multi-national citizen of Argentina, Israel, Palestine and Spain, conducted Wozzeck, Don Giovanni. BARRAULT , Jean-Louis (1910–94), artistic director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon from 1959 to 1968, of the Théâtre du Rond-Point from 1981 to 1992. BATAILLON , Michel, translator, Planchon’s dramaturg and biographer. BEAUNESNE , Yves, actor, director, Chéreau’s assistant for Wozzeck, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, La Reine Margot. BENGELL , Norma (1935–2013), Brazilian actress, singer, producer, performed in La Dispute (1973), Les Paravents.

202

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

BERRI , Claude (1934–2009), screenwriter, producer of Hôtel de France, co-producer of L’Homme blessé and La Reine Margot. BERTIN , Roland, stage and film actor, performed in Les Soldats, Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir, Massacre à Paris, Toller, La Dispute, Peer Gynt, Quartett, L’Homme blessé. BICKEL , Moidele (1937–2016), costume designer, dressed Dans la solitude des champs de coton, Le Temps et la Chambre, Wozzeck, La Reine Margot, Don Giovanni, Phèdre. BIRKIN , Jane, actress, singer, performed in La Fausse Suivante. BLANC , Dominique, actress, performed in Peer Gynt, Les Paravents, Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, La Reine Margot, Phèdre, La Douleur. BLIN , Roger (1907–84), actor, director, member of the Groupe Octobre, was the first to direct Beckett and Genet in France. BONDY , Luc (1948–2015), co-director of the Schaubühne from 1985 to 1987, artistic director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon from 2012 to his death. BONNAFFÉ , Jacques, stage and film actor, director, performed in Claude Stratz’s productions of Le Legs and L’Epreuve. BONNEFOY , Yves (1923–2016), poet and essayist, translator of Hamlet, As You Like It. BOULEZ , Pierre (1925–2016), composer and conductor, conducted Der Ring des Nibelungen, Lulu, De la Maison des Morts. BRUNI TEDESCHI , Valeria, actress, trained at Les Amandiers, performed in Hôtel de France, Platonov, Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, La Reine Margot, Rêve d’automne. CALVARIO , Philippe, actor, Chéreau’s assistant for Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments), performed in Les Visages et les Corps, Intimité, Gabrielle, was to play Silvius in Comme il vous plaira. CARPI , Fiorenzo (1918–97), pianist and composer, co-founder of the Piccolo Teatro, composed the stage music of Massacre à Paris, Toller, La Chair de l’orchidée, L’Homme blessé, Peer Gynt. CARRÈRE , Céline, actress, played Margaret in Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments). CASARÈS , Maria (1922–96), stage and film actress, performed in Peer Gynt, Les Paravents, Quai Ouest. CHAHINE , Youssef (1926–2008), Lebanese filmmaker, directed Adieu Bonaparte.

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CHAUVELOT , Pénélope, photographer for Chéreau and Bondy at Les Amandiers. CITTI , Marc, actor, trained at Les Amandiers, performed in Hôtel de France, Platonov, Hamlet, Le Temps et la Chambre, La Reine Margot. CLÉMENT , Jérôme, writer, founder of the TV channel Arte France, chaired it from 1989 to 2011, held various posts in the national administration of culture. COHN -BENDIT , Daniel, French-German politician, leader of the May 1968 uprising. COPEAU , Jacques (1879–1949), founder of the Théâtre du VieuxColombier in 1913. CORTESE, Valentina, Italian actress, performed in Le Compagnon, Lulu. COUTANT , Philippe, administrator of les Amandiers until 1990, then of Théâtre de l’Odéon till 1992. CROMBECQUE , Alain (1939–2009), artistic adviser of Les Amandiers, directed the Festival d’automne from 1972 to 1976 and 1993 to 2009, the Festival d’Avignon from 1985 to 1992. DAMIANI , Luciano (1923–2007), stage and costume designer of Giorgio Strehler. DELANNOY , Daniel (1958–89), lighting designer of Quartett, Quai Ouest, Platonov, Hamlet and Bondy’s Le Conte d’hiver. DENICOURT -CUAU , Marianne, actress, trained at Les Amandiers, performed in Hôtel de France, Platonov, Hamlet. DÉPRATS , Jean-Michel, university lecturer, general editor and translator of Shakespeare for the Pléiade/Gallimard. DESARTHE , Gérard, actor and director, performed in Richard II, Lear, La Dispute, Peer Gynt, L’Homme blessé, Hamlet, was to play Jaques in Comme il vous plaira. DESPLÉCHIN , Arnaud, screenwriter and film maker. DIMITRIÁDIS , Dimítris, Greek poet, playwright and translator, author of Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir. DIOT , André, director of photography and lighting for Les Soldats, Richard II, Massacre à Paris, La Dispute, Peer Gynt. DOILLON , Jacques, film director, filmed L’Amoureuse with the Amandiers students. DORT , Bernard (1929–94) scholar, founder of Travail théâtral, chief executive of the Theatre department at the Ministry of Culture from 1988 to 1989.

204

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

DUCHAUSSOY, Michel (1938–2012), actor, played Théramène in Phèdre. DULLIN , Charles (1885–1949), pupil of Copeau, director of the Théâtre de l’Atelier. DURAS, Marguerite (1914–96), writer, film maker, author of La Douleur. DURIS , Romain, actor, performed in La Nuit juste avant les forêts, Persécution. EMILFORK , Daniel (1924–2006), actor, coach, Duke of York in Richard II, directed La Journée des chaussures in the Avignon season of Les Amandiers. FOSSE , Jon, Norwegian playwright, poet and novelist, author of Rêve d’automne (Dram om hausten, 1999) and I am the Wind (Eg er vinden, 2007). GENET , Jean (1910–86), poet, playwright and novelist, author of Les Paravents. GIGNOUX , Hubert (1915–2008), a pioneer of decentralization, founder of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg in 1968. GLUCKSMANN , André (1937–2015), philosopher and essayist. GODARD , Colette, journalist, theatre critic of Le Monde from 1971 to 1994. GOLDIN , Nan, American photographer, author of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. GRASSI , Paolo (1919–81), founder of the Piccolo Teatro with Strehler in 1947. GREGGORY , Pascal, actor, played Horatio, then Fortinbras in Hamlet, the Client in Solitude, Duke of Anjou in La Reine Margot, Theseus in Phèdre. GRINBERG , Anouk, actress, played Marie Steuber in the stage and film versions of Le Temps et la Chambre. GRÜBER , Klaus Michael (1941–2008), German theatre director and actor. GUIBERT , Hervé (1955–91), writer and journalist, author of the screenplay of L’Homme blessé and of Le Mausolée des amants, journal 1976–1987. GUYOTAT , Pierre, novelist and playwright, author of Coma. HÉLIOT , Armelle, journalist, theatre critic of Le Quotidien de Paris until 1994, chief editor for culture of Le Figaro.

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

205

HERNANDEZ , Brigitte, journalist, chief editor of Le Point. HESME , Clotilde, actress, was to play Rosalind in Comme il vous plaira. HUGUET , Jérôme, actor, Richard of Gloucester in Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments). HUGUET , Vincent, art historian, curator of the Louvre exhibition, dramaturg of Rêve d’automne, Elektra, and the projected Comme il vous plaira. HUPPERT , Isabelle, film and stage actress, played the title role in Gabrielle. HUTHWOHL , Joël, theatre historian, executive director of the Département des arts du théâtre at the BnF. JAOUI , Agnès, actress, singer, screenwriter and film maker, trained at Les Amandiers, performed in Hôtel de France and L’Amoureuse. JONES , Gwyneth, Welsh soprano singer, interpreted Brünnhilde in the Ring. JOURDHEUIL , Jean, university lecturer, writer, essayist and translator, dramaturg of Jean-Pierre-Vincent at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. KELLER , Marthe, film and stage actress, played Gertrude in the first Hamlet. KOLTÈS , Bernard-Marie (1948–89), playwright, author of La Nuit avant les forêts, Combat de nègre et de chiens, Quai Ouest, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, Le Retour au désert, Roberto Zucco, translator of The Winter’s Tale for Luc Bondy. KOURILSKY , Françoise (1933–2012), drama critic and director, founder of the Ubu Repertory Theater, New York, in 1982. LAN , David, artistic director of the Young Vic from 2000 to 2018. LANG , Jack, founder of the Festival de Nancy, Minister of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and 1988 to 1992. LAVAUDANT , Georges, artistic director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon from 1996 to 2007. LE ROUX , Monique, theatre historian, drama critic of La Quinzaine littéraire, now En attendant Nadeau. LEYRIS , Pierre (1907–2001), poet, general editor of Shakespeare’s complete works for Club Français du Livre, translator of Richard II.

206

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

LIBOLT , Alain, actor, performed in Massacre à Paris, Le Compagnon, Toller, La Dispute, Hamlet. LOAYZA , Daniel, translator, artistic adviser of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe since 1996, dramaturg for Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments). LOYRETTE , Henri, curator and art historian, director of the Musée d’Orsay from 1994 to 2001, director-chairman of the Musée du Louvre from 2001 to 2013. MALRAUX , André (1901–76), novelist, art theorist, Minister of Culture from 1959 to 1969. MARÉCHAL , Marcel, director of theatres successively in Lyon, Marseille and Paris, played Sganarelle in Dom Juan. MARQUAIS , Michelle, actress, performed in Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir, Richard II, Toller, Quartett, Rêve d’automne. MAZURA , Franz, bass-baritone opera singer, interpreted Günther in Der Ring des Nibelungen, Doktor Schön in Lulu, Orest’s tutor in Elektra. MC INTYRE , Donald, bass-baritone, Wotan in the Ring, An Old Servant in Elektra. MEIER , Waltraud, mezzo-soprano, Marie in Wozzeck, Isolde in Tristan und Isolde, Klytemnästra in Elektra. MERLEAU -PONTY , Marianne, director of publications at Les Amandiers from 1982 to 1988. MESGUICH , Daniel, stage and film actor, director of the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique from 2007 to 2013. MESGUICH , Sarah, daughter of Daniel, actress, performed in Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments). METGE , Stéphane, documentarist, author of several films and records of Chéreau’s works. MNOUCHKINE , Ariane, director, screenwriter and film maker, founder of the Théâtre du Soleil in 1964. MÜLLER , André, pen name of Willi Fetz, German historian of the theatre. MÜLLER , Heiner (1929–95), East German poet, playwright, essayist and theatre director, author of Quartett. NUSSAC , Sylvie de, journalist, editor of Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, Peer Gynt, textes, matériaux, documents and Nanterre Amandiers, les années Chéreau 1981–1990.

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

207

OGIER , Bulle, actress, performed in Le Temps et la Chambre and Rêve d’automne. PEDUZZI, Richard, painter, designer, Chéreau’s scenographer since 1969, director of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs from 1990 to 2002, of the Villa Médicis from 2002 to 2008. PEREZ , Vincent, actor, performed in Hôtel de France, Platonov, Hamlet, La Reine Margot, Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train. PÉRON , Denise, wife of Daniel Emilfork, taught with him at the Ecole des Amandiers, performed in La Journée des chaussures. PFRIMMER , Edouard, scholar, writer, translator of Brecht. PICCOLI , Michel, stage and film actor, performed in Combat de nègre et de chiens, La Fausse Suivante, Retour au désert and in Bondy’s Le Conte d’hiver. PLANCHON , Roger (1931–2009), actor, director, playwright, film maker, director of Théâtre National Populaire, Lyon-Villeurbanne, from 1972 to 2002. POIROT-DELPECH, Bertrand (1929–2006), journalist, essayist, novelist, chronicler for Le Monde from 1951, specialized in the theatre from 1959 to 1972. QUESTER , Hugues, actor, performed in Richard II, Toller, La Dispute, La Chair de l’orchidée. RABOURDIN , Olivier, actor, performed in the school Twelfth Night, Hamlet, was to play Oliver in Comme il vous plaira. REGNAULT , François, philosopher, university lecturer, essayist, writer, translator, literary adviser at Les Amandiers until 1987. RENUCCI , Robin, actor and director, played Claudius in Hamlet. ROMANS , Pierre (1950–90), actor, director, founder and teacher of Ecole de Nanterre-Amandiers. RUF , Eric, actor, director, scenographer, administrator general of the Comédie-Française since 2014, played Hippolyte in Phèdre. RYLANCE , Mark, actor, director, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 1995 to 2005, performed in Intimacy. SALONEN , Esa-Pekka, composer and conductor, conducted Elektra at the Festival d’Aix. SANDRE , Didier, actor, director, performed in Peer Gynt, Les Paravents, La Fausse Suivante.

208

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

SCHMIDT , Jacques (1933–96), costume designer, dressed nearly all Chéreau’s productions from 1958 to his death. SERRÉ , André, sound engineer in Sartrouville and TNP -Villeurbanne, created the sounds of Toller, La Dispute. SIMON , François (1917–82), actor, director, performed in Toller, Lear, Loin d’Hagondange, La Chair de l’orchidée, Judith Therpauve. SIX , Valérie, Communications officer at the Théâtre de l’Odéon since 1990. SOBEL , Bernard, founder and director of the Théâtre de Gennevilliers from 1964 to 2006, filmed Lulu, Wozzeck and Lucio Silla for television. STAROBINSKI , Jean (1920–2019), Swiss literary critic, historian, specialized in the history of ideas and the history of medicine. STEIN , Peter, German theatre, opera and film director, screenwriter, director of the Schaubühne from 1970 to 1985. STRANCAR , Nada, actress, lecturer at the Conservatoire, performed in Peer Gynt, was the Player Queen, then Gertrude, in Hamlet. STRATZ , Claude (1946–2007), Chéreau’s assistant at the Théâtre des Amandiers from 1981 to 1988, director of the Conservatoire from 2001 until his death. STREHLER , Giorgio (1921–97), director, founder of the Piccolo Teatro with Grassi in 1947, and of the Théâtre des Nations based at the Odéon since 1983. TASCA , Catherine, administrator of Les Amandiers until 1986, Minister of Culture from 2000 to 2002, vice-president of the Sénat. TÉCHINÉ , André, screenwriter and film maker, directed L’Atelier with the first class of Nanterre students. THIEÛ NIANG, Thierry, dancer, choreographer, directed Chéreau’s readings of La Douleur and Coma, collaborated to Cosi Fan Tutte, De la maison des morts, Rêve d’automne and I am the Wind. THOMPSON , Danièle, film maker, co-authored the screenplays of La Reine Margot, Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train. TODESCHINI , Bruno, actor, trained at Les Amandiers, performed in Hôtel de France, Platonov, Hamlet, La Reine Margot, Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train, Son frère. VALLI , Alida (1921–2006), Italian actress, performed in Massacre à Paris, La Chair de l’orchidée.

APPENDIX 2: LIST OF PEOPLE CITED

209

VAN HOVE , Ivo, stage director, director of the Holland Festival from 1998 to 2004, director of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam since 2001. VAUTHIER , Jean (1910–92), playwright, translator of Massacre à Paris. VÉZINET , Christine, actress, married Alain Crombecque in 1996, trained at Les Amandiers, played Feste in La Nuit des Rois. VILAR , Jean (1912–71), founded the Festival d’Avignon in 1947 and directed it until his death, director of the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP ) from 1951 to 1963. VINAVER , Michel, playwright, translator of Le Temps et la Chambre for Chéreau, of Jules César for Claude Stratz. VINCENT , Hélène, stage and film actress, performed in L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine, Les Soldats, Le Voleur de femmes, Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir. VINCENT , Jean-Pierre, director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg from 1975 to 1983, administrator general of the Comédie-Française from 1983 to 1986, director of Les Amandiers from 1990 to 2001. VITEZ , Antoine (1930–90), artistic director of the Théâtre de Chaillot from 1981 to 1988, administrator general of the Comédie-Française from 1988 until his death. WAJDA , Andrzej (1926–2016), Polish stage and film director, screenwriter. WENZEL , Jean-Pierre, playwright, director and actor, author of Loin d’Hagondange. WILSON , Georges (1921–2010), artistic director of the TNP from 1963 to 1972. WILSON , Robert, playwright, director, visual artist in a variety of media, directed Hamletmachine at Les Amandiers. YORDANOFF , Wladimir, actor, played the Ghost, then Claudius, in Hamlet.

NOTES

Introduction 1

After various conversations, answering my question, ‘What did Chéreau expect from Shakespeare?’ in an email dated 9 November 2015.

2

Lise Tréhot was Renoir’s main female model and his mistress from 1866 to 1872. The painting Lise à l’ombrelle is reproduced in the catalogue Patrice Chéreau: un musée imaginaire / An Imaginary Museum, ed. Aude Marquet (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015), 292.

3

In Le Monde, 7 October 2013, and L’Humanité, 9 October 2013.

4

Peintures récentes de Jean-Baptiste Chéreau, Villeurbanne, 10 January–3 February 1964.

5

Raymonde Temkine, Mettre en scène au présent (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1977), II , 111–13.

6

Chéreau, Les Visages et les Corps, ed. Vincent Huguet and Clément Hervieu-Léger (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2010), 93–4. All translations mine, unless otherwise stated.

7

Chéreau, ‘Le Louvre invite Patrice Chéreau: Les visages et les corps’, Dossier de presse, 2 November 2010–31 January 2011.

8

Sébastien Allard, curator, ‘Correspondances poétiques’, in Visages, 68.

9

Visages, 48.

10 Anne-Françoise Benhamou, Patrice Chéreau: Figurer le réel (Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2015), 12. 11 In 1973–4, while recovering from a stroke. Reprinted in Un musée imaginaire, 298–301. 12 Visages, 46.

212

NOTES

Chapter 1 1

In Le Figaro, ‘Shakespeare et les étudiants’, June 1962, Marcelle Capron notes that the duels are ‘masterfully staged by Patrice Chéreau’.

2

Visages, 95.

3

Regnault, ‘Erudition’, in Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: der Ring des Nibelungen de Richard Wagner, Bayreuth 1976–1980, ed. Sylvie de Nussac (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), 107.

4

‘L’imaginaire historique: Patrice Chéreau’, interview with Antoine Lachand, La Fabrique de l’Histoire, France-Culture, 2 March 2008. Online at http://www.fabriquedesens.net/ L-imaginaire-historique-Patrice

5

Stein’s dramaturg, Jean Jourdheuil, had assisted Vincent’s earlier production. Vincent played Mistingue in Chéreau’s Lourcine.

6

Interview with Moussa Abadi, France-Culture, 23 June 1966.

7

‘La scène imaginaire de Patrice Chéreau’, 25 March 2013, Bibliothèques de l’Odéon, broadcast by France-Culture on 31 March. See Chapter 8 in this volume.

8

Visages, 152. As a subscriber, he got seats for their five yearly productions, and invitations to all the concerts, debates, readings with the actors.

9

Jean Starobinski, L’Invention de la liberté (1700–1789) suivi de Les Emblèmes de la Raison (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

10 ‘L’imaginaire historique’. 11 Visages, 158. 12 Visages, 45. 13 Mr Arkadin / Confidential Report, 1955. 14 Sobel had worked in the Berliner Ensemble and been Vilar’s assistant for Arturo Ui. On the political debates around the theatre of the 1960s, see Lea Valette’s thesis, Les lieux de la critique de théâtre en France: enjeux esthétiques et convictions politiques (1964–1981), Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, November 2014, online at https://bdr.u-paris10.fr/theses/ internet/2014PA100115.pdf, pp. 28–85, 187–92.

NOTES

213

15 See Colette Godard, ‘Apprentissage’, in her Patrice Chéreau: un trajet (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 14–38. 16 Chéreau, ‘Un théâtre à Sartrouville’, théâtre 78, no. 1, November 1967, 1. 17 théâtre 78, no. 3, April 1968, 10–11. 18 Claude Baignières, Le Figaro, 5 June 1967. 19 Chéreau, programme. See Gilles Sandier’s analysis in Théâtre et combat (Paris: Stock, 1970), 169–70. 20 Robert Kanters, L’Express, in théâtre 78, no. 3, April 1968, 16. 21 Dort, reviewing the policy of cultural decentralization over the past twenty years, ‘Le jeu du théâtre et de la réalité’, Les Temps modernes, no. 263, April 1968. 22 A concept created by Francis Jeanson, freshly returned from Algeria and amnestied after his support of the FLN , who was the main author of the Déclaration. See Jeanson, ‘La Réunion de Villeurbanne’, in La Décentralisation théâtrale, 2, Les Années Malraux 1959–1969 (Arles: Actes-Sud, 1993). 23 Le Monde, 2–3 November 1969. 24 Chéreau, ‘Une mort exemplaire’, Partisans, no. 47, January 1969, 64–8. 25 He told Colette Godard (p. 20) that Planchon showed him these photos when he brought Les Âmes mortes to the Odéon, i.e. in 1960, but it must have been later; Strehler’s Vita di Galileo was produced in 1963. 26 Chéreau, to Godard, 20. On Strehler’s early influence, see Odette Aslan, Chéreau. De Sartrouville à Nanterre, vol. XIV of Les Voies de la création théâtrale (Paris: Editions du CNRS , 1986), 22. 27 For a projected Tristan at the Milan Scala in 1978, Chéreau, Visages, 94. 28 Le Monde, 27 December 1997. 29 See Strehler’s detailed discussion of the set, costumes and props, in ‘Lettera a Luciano Damani per l’allestimento delle scene di Vita di Galileo’, December 1962. 30 Letter quoted in David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112.

214

NOTES

31 Ugo Ronfani, Io, Strehler: Conversazioni con Ugo Ronfani (Milan: Rusconi, 1986) 63–6, trans. Hirst, 10. Copeau, founder of the Vieux-Colombier theatre, co-founded the influential Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) with André Gide et al. Strehler was acquainted with Copeau’s work through his own longstanding friendship with Louis Jouvet. 32 Strehler, ‘Un rêve partagé’, in Jean Vilar, ed. Jacques Téphany, Cahiers de l’Herne, no. 67, 1995, 141–2. 33 Wajda’s film Danton (1983) is not directly based on Büchner but on Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s The Danton Case. 34 P. Grassi, G. Strehler, M. Apollonio and V. Todi, Lettera programmatica per Il Piccolo Teatro della città di Milano, ‘Il Politecnico’, no. 35, January–March 1947. 35 Aslan, ‘Les éléments d’une poétique’, in Chéreau, 17. 36 Le Monde, 3 February 1970, correcting a misprint, ‘missionnaire’, in Godard’s article of 30 January. 37 Text of Duhamel’s press conference, 29 March 1972, reprinted in Bataillon, Un Défi en province. Chéreau. 1972–1982 (Paris: Marval, 2005), 126–7. Chéreau’s memories of those years and his position as a guest, 46–9. 38 ‘Nous, les choreutes’, Les Temps modernes, no. 317, December 1972. 39 In September 1981. Jack Lang, ‘Patrice et la fidélité d’une amitié’, Patrice Chéreau: un musée imaginaire, 46. 40 ‘L’imaginaire historique’. 41 Interview with Hervé Guibert, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 24 February–3 March 1977. 42 Lettre ouverte de Patrice Chéreau, ‘Comment peut-on renoncer à jouer?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 7–13 August 2003. 43 The Socialist Party having lost the elections in 1986, Mitterrand had to ‘cohabit’ with Jacques Chirac as his Prime Minister until his own re-election in 1988, when Pierre Bergé was named President of the Paris Operas. In January 1989 Bergé broke Barenboim’s contract with the preceding government, causing Chéreau and Boulez to resign. 44 In April 2011. Py was soon offered the management of the Festival d’Avignon in compensation.

NOTES

215

45 Adapted by Mnouchkine from the transcript of Havel’s trial, performed in a disused tram depot on 9 February 1980, it was broadcast on 13 February by the German and Austrian television channels that reached Czechoslovakia. See a detailed report at http://www.zeit.de/1980/08/prager-prozesse/ komplettansicht 46 Dort, ‘Patrice Chéreau ou le piège du théâtre’, Théâtre réel: essais de critique 1967–1970 (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 104–5. 47 ‘Formations’, Visages, 162. 48 Bataillon, Défi, 72. 49 Crombecque was vice-president of the UNEF in 1964–5. 50 On France-Culture, interview with Moussa Abadi, 23 June 1966. 51 IMEC , Institut Mémoires de l’Ecriture Contemporaine, is based at the Abbaye d’Ardenne, near Caen. 52 ‘Entretien avec Hélène Vincent: Travailler avec Patrice Chéreau (1963–1969)’, Revue d’études théâtrales, Registres, 5, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, December 2000, 45. She had performed the year before in Vincent’s production of Kleist’s Zerbrochene Klug translated by Chéreau. 53 Dimítris Dimitriádis, Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir, trans. Victor Galanis, adapted and directed by Chéreau, October 1968. 54 ‘L’imaginaire historique’. 55 Chéreau to Bataillon, in Défi, 56. Among these additions, he mentions scenes from Shakespeare, but Shakespeare was already part of the original draft. 56 Défi, 59. 57 théâtre 78, no. 4, October 1968, 1. 58 IMEC , CHR 112, ‘Sartrouville’, 17 September 1968. 59 Défi, 55. 60 It was announced at a press conference in August 1971, ‘Al Piccolo Teatro si progettagià il futuro Antonio e Cleopatra con Valentina Cortese e Giorgio Albertazzi’, to be directed by ‘il regista Patrice Chéreau’, reported in L’Unità of 6 August, and probably abandoned when Albertazzi desisted. 61 ‘Antonio e Cleopatra’, CHR 44.1. On Chéreau’s mark in Italy, see Franco Quadri, Il Teatro degli anni settanta. Tradizione e

216

NOTES

ricerca (Stein, Chéreau, Ronconi, Mnouchkine, Grüber, Bene) (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). 62 Neruda, foreword to Splendeur et mort de Joaquin Murieta (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 7. 63 Chéreau, ‘Comment j’ai traduit Neruda sur scène’, interview with Jo Excoffier, Journal de Genève, no. 21, August 1970, 15. In Neruda’s play, Murieta is a Chilean gold-digger. 64 See Robert Ellis, ‘Revolution of Love: Bavaria 1918–1919’, in Ernst Toller and German Society: Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914–1939 (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 85–130. 65 See his account of this evolution, criticism of the play’s shortcomings, and debt to Regnault’s adaptation, in ‘La mousse, l’écume’, 4–10. 66 ‘L’autoportrait de Patrice Chéreau’, L’Express Rhône-Alpes, no. 44, March 1974, 73. 67 Chéreau to François Truan, ‘Le spectacle qui mérite un voyage à Lyon’, Journal de Genève, 20–21 January 1973, quoted by Aslan, 27.

Chapter 2 1

See Catherine Treilhou-Balaudé, ‘Patrice Chéreau, metteur en scène de Shakespeare’, Shakespeare et la France (Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2000), 242–9, online at http:// shakespeare.revues.org/638

2

‘L’imaginaire historique’.

3

The text, adapted by Richard Kalisz and translated by Victor Galanis, was co-produced with the Théâtre de la Commune, Aubervilliers, created there on 12 October 1968, and transferred to Sartrouville, in sets designed by Patrice Chéreau.

4

CHR 112, Texte 7, typed playtext. Cf. Chéreau’s comments on the failure of both theatrical attempts, with Shakespeare and with a modern play, in théâtre 78, no. 4, October 1968, 1.

5

He made two donations to IMEC in 1996 and 2008.

NOTES

217

6

First printed by Christian Bourgois in 1969, it circulated earlier in the gay community.

7

CHR 112, Texte 4, 5, 6.

8

CHR 112, Notes de travail 1.

9

The assassination in 1963 of Grigoris Lambrakis, which the queen of Greece and her party were thought to have condoned, would inspire Costa-Gavras’s film Z in 1969.

10 Chéreau, quoted by Jacqueline Autrusseau in Les Lettres françaises, ‘Contestation et recherche à Aubervilliers’, 16 October 1968. 11 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, Le Monde, 15 October 1968. 12 Chéreau, ‘Contestation et recherche’. 13 Antonin Artaud, ‘No More Masterpieces’, in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 74–83. 14 Matthieu Galey in Combat, 16 October 1968. 15 Galey, Combat, 16 October 1968; and Gilles Sandier, ‘Théâtre d’après Mai’, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 60, 1–15 November 1968. Henry Rabine in La Croix, 27 October 1968, suggested fifty minutes at least of these extracts should be cut. 16 See Estelle Rivier’s description, ‘La scène de Richard II: aire de jeu et jeux de pouvoir’, in Shakespeare au XXe siècle: Mises en scène, mises en perspective de King Richard II , ed. Pascale Drouet (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 39–53. 17 See Yvette Daoust’s description in Roger Planchon: Director and Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 59–63. Chéreau’s notes, IMEC archives, CHR 114. 18 About the set of his Troilus and Cressida (1966), Daoust, Planchon, 66. 19 Ronfani, Io, Strehler, 137, trans. Hirst, 63. 20 See Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 161–5. Shewring does not mention Chéreau’s Richard II, but moves straight to Mnouchkine’s. 21 Aslan, ‘Les éléments d’une poétique’, Chéreau, 36–9. 22 Dort, ‘Shakespeare aujourd’hui et demain’, France-Observateur, 15 October 1964.

218

NOTES

23 Bataillon, Défi, I, 60, 111. Planchon’s Henry IV was created in 1958. 24 See Gerry McCarthy, ‘Roger Planchon’, in The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 340. For a detailed description of Planchon’s Richard III, see Daoust, Planchon, 70–4. 25 Planchon, discussing his Henry IV in an interview with Michael Kustow for Theatre Quarterly, no. 5, January–March 1972, 42–57. 26 See D. Goy-Blanquet, ‘Meurtres dans un jardin français’, with Daniel Mesguich, Stuart Seide, Georges Lavaudant, François Marthouret, Christian Colin and Bernard Sobel, L’Angleterre à contre-courant, Esprit, July 1985. 27 ‘Henri VI ’, in Souvenirs pour demain (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 335–6. 28 ‘Découvrons un metteur en scène de 22 ans’, Arts, 14 December 1966. 29 ‘Shakespeare notre contemporain’, Les Langues modernes, January 1965, reprinted in Shakespeare et le désordre du monde, ed. D. Goy-Blanquet (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 30. 30 ‘Notes de travail’, Archives Chéreau, IMEC , CHR 114. 31 In Theater der Zeit, 9, 1966, 1–10. André Müller is the pen name of Willi Fetz. 32 Le diverse e artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, Paris, 1588. 33 Richard II, produced at the Nouveau Gymnase, Marseille, 1970, transferred for seventeen performances to the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1971. 34 In Le Monde, 3 February 1970. 35 Interview with Paul-Louis Mignon, ‘Les Trois Coups’, ORTF, 1 February 1970. 36 Chéreau to Jean-Paul Drouet, ‘À Marseille Patrice Chéreau monte Richard II chez Bourseiller’, La Croix, 14 January 1970. 37 Interview with Paul-Louis Mignon, ORTF, ‘Les Trois Coups’, 1 February 1970. 38 Programme of Richard II.

NOTES

219

39 Aslan, 50. 40 Chéreau, ‘Esquisse d’une théorie du pouvoir’, programme of Richard II. 41 Chéreau, programme. 42 Treilhou-Balaudé, ‘Patrice Chéreau, metteur en scène de Shakespeare’, 246–7. 43 Dort, Théâtre réel, 110–11. 44 Benhamou, Figurer, 43. 45 W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton University Press, 2000), 68, 166. 46 Jean Vigneron, La Croix, 8 February 1970. 47 Chéreau, ‘Un art de la modification’, Visages, 187. 48 See Dort’s analysis, Théâtre réel, 109. 49 Chéreau, ‘Esquisse d’une théorie du pouvoir’. 50 This was Brecht’s epoch-making adaptation of Marlowe’s tragedy in Munich, 1924. 51 Sandier, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 89, 16 February 1970. 52 Paul Thibaud, ‘Mystère du talent? Conclusion de la critique du Richard II’, Esprit, no. 390, March 1970, 591–2. In the next issue, ‘Suite à la critique des critiques’, no. 391, April 1970, 785, Alfred Simon denounced the venomous campaign led by the right-wing Figaro against Chéreau and Marcel Maréchal, manager of the Marseille theatre. 53 To Godard, in Le Monde, 30 January 1970. The Odéon was then run directly by the Ministry of Culture, no one having been named at its head after Barrault. 54 Shakespeare, Œuvres complètes, bilingual edition, dir. Pierre Leyris and Henry Evans, based on the Cambridge New Shakespeare (Paris, 1954–1961). 55 In Le Monde, 3 February 1970. 56 ‘Traduction: Leyris du métier’, punning on ‘les risques du métier’, a common French phrase, interview with Mathieu Lindon, Libération, 9 November 1995. 57 Guy Dumur, ‘Le saut de l’ange’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 February 1970.

220

NOTES

58 Leyris, ‘A propos de Richard II’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 March 1970. 59 ‘C’est Shakespeare qu’ils n’aiment pas’, Action, 11 May 1945. 60 See Déprats, ‘Esquisse d’une problématique de la traduction shakespearienne’, Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, no. 92–94, 1999, 39–48. 61 For instance Gautier and Lemarchand in Le Figaro, FrançoisRégis Bastide in Les Nouvelles littéraires. 62 Renée Saurel, ‘Chéreau et Planchon excommuniés’, Les Temps modernes, no. 146, March 1970, 1541. 63 Treilhou-Balaudé, ‘Patrice Chéreau: Shakespeare, le choix du théâtre’, in Shakespeare sur la scène française hier et aujoud’hui, ed. John Golder (Paris: Garnier, 2016), 200–1. 64 ‘Patrice Chéreau: Ce que j’ai voulu faire . . .’, interview with Françoise Varenne, Le Figaro, 12 February 1970. 65 Chéreau, to Jean-Paul Drouet, La Croix, 14 January 1970. 66 To Franco Quadri, Il teatro degli anni Settanta, vol. I, Tradizione e ricerca: Stein, Chéreau, Ronconi, Mnouchkine, Grüber, Bene (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). 67 To Godard during the rehearsals of Massacre, Le Monde, 11 May 1972. 68 The Catalan painter Modest Cuixart, Visages, 47. Planchon recalled the meeting for Raymonde Temkine, Mettre en scène, II , 111. 69 Nice-matin, 9 December 1971. 70 Chéreau, ‘La mousse, l’écume’, interview with Émile Copfermann, Travail théâtral, no. XI , Spring 1973, 12. 71 To Godard, ‘Les Massacres de Paris de Marlowe’, Le Monde, 11 May 1972. 72 ‘La mousse, l’écume’, 13. 73 IMEC , CHR 118. 74 Notes written during rehearsals of Massacre, IMEC , CHR 118. 75 Lerrant, Le Progrès de Lyon, 23 May 1972. 76 Note dated 15 February 1972, CHR 118, evoking the massacre of October 1961.

NOTES

221

77 There is no agreed translation of Lacan’s phrase, for lack of a similar concept in the English language. ‘Volonté de jouissance’, says Dr Patrick Miller, aims to transgress the limits of the pleasure principle in a negative flaring that obstructs thought and destroys representations. 78 Texte 7, notes de travail 1–4. 79 François Truan, Journal de Genève, 27 May 1972. 80 Temkine gave a detailed description of the production in La Pensée, February 1973, reprinted in her Mettre en scène, II , 132–5. 81 Chéreau, ‘La mousse, l’écume’, 11–12. 82 Interview with Aslan, ‘Pourquoi Peer Gynt?’ Chéreau, 139. 83 CHR 100.4. 84 Chéreau, programme of Massacre, May 1972. 85 To Bataillon, Défi, 147. 86 Danièle Thompson, ‘Une grande salle vide’ / ‘An empty auditorium’, in Un musée imaginaire, 198. 87 Chéreau in L’Echo-La Liberté, 11 May 1972. 88 Jean-Jacques Lerrant, Progrès, 23 May. 89 Chéreau, ‘La mousse, l’écume’, 11. 90 Jean-Noël Vuarnet, ‘Qui a fait le massacre?’, Nouvel Observateur, 12 June 1972. 91 Press file, BnF Richelieu Arts du Spectacle. Bataillon gives large extracts of the reviews in Défi, 149–62. 92 Robert Kanters, ‘Comme un grand livre d’images’, France-Soir, 25 May 1972. 93 Pierre Marcabru, France-Soir, 23 May 1972. 94 Les Lettres françaises, 31 May 1972. 95 Jean-Pierre Léonardini, ‘Bruit et fureur’, L’Humanité, 24 May 1972. ‘Les égouts de l’histoire’, Travail théâtral, no. 8, Summer 1972, 134–6. 96 Godard, ‘Les Massacres de Paris’, Le Monde, 11 May 1972. 97 Godard, ‘Alida Valli: le sourire d’une dame en noir’, Le Monde, 25 May 1972. 98 Poirot-Delpech, Le Monde, 27 May 1972, and ‘Relâche chez les héritiers de Jean Vilar’, Le Monde, 13 July 1972.

222

99

NOTES

Christine Fouché, Réforme, 24 June.

100 François Truan, Journal de Genève, 27 May. 101 Thomas Quinn Curtis, ‘Splashdown for Marlowe in TNP ’s Massacre at Paris’, Herald Tribune, 8 June. 102 Chéreau, letter to Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, Le Monde, 20 July 1972. 103 To Bataillon, Défi, 53, 104 To Alain Leblanc, ‘Bond et Chéreau à l’Odéon: l’homme est un scandale’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 6 October 1975. 105 Béatrice Chavaux, their PR , interviewed by Caroline MounierVehier and Samantha Pelé in Villeurbanne, 25 October 2012, Agôn, Enquêtes, Souvenirs de théâtre, TNP, updated 2013, http://agon.ens-lyon.fr/index.php?id=2611 106 To Michel Grey, ‘Chéreau à l’Odéon avec “Lear” en attendant la “Tétralogie” à Bayreuth’, L’Aurore, 16 October 1975. 107 Mathieu Galey, Le Quotidien de Paris, 14 June 1975, thought Bond may have been influenced by this memorable production. Brook’s King Lear was performed at the Odéon in the Théâtre des Nations programme of 1963, and the film released in 1971. 108 To Jacqueline Tenret, ‘Patrice Chéreau: “On n’arrête pas d’apprendre” ’, s.d., s.l, BnF press file on Lear, 1975. 109 IMEC archives, six undated typewritten pages, CHR 168. 110 Un Défi, 58–9. 111 Chéreau, programme note, Villeurbanne, April 1975. 112 Chéreau’s ‘almost hysterical programme note’ as translated by Mike Ashman, Plays and Players, no. 23, March 1976, 39. 113 Chéreau’s ‘programme note’, Ashman’s translation. 114 To Godard, Le Monde, 2 April 1975. 115 So he told Raymonde Temkine at the time, 118. 116 Interview with Lerrant, Atac-Informations, no. 67, April 1975. 117 Lucien Attoun, ‘L’Enfer, c’est . . .’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 27 October 1975. 118 Gilles Sandier, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16–31 May 1970. 119 Sandier, Théâtre en crise: Des années 70 à 82 (Grenoble: La Pensée sauvage, 1982), 97–9.

NOTES

223

120 Stendhal, De l’amour, Book 2, ch. 59, here in Guilbert and Suzanne Sale’s translation, Love (London: Merlin Press, 1957). 121 André Glucksmann, ‘Réflexions sur le Lear de Chéreau: Un œil pour Lénine’, Le Monde, 6 November 1975. In his programme note, Chéreau had quoted Glucksmann, ‘Enfant du siècle, tu seras enfant de Buchenwald et de la Kolyma.’ 122 Notes dated 12 July and 7 August. A reference to Sartre’s phrase during his companionship with the Communist party, ‘One must not make Billancourt despair’, i.e. better not tell the whole truth about Soviet camps to the workers. 123 Odéon programme, October 1975. His notes during the summer of 1975, CHR 167, express similar reactions to the reviewers’ political agenda. 124 To Godard, ‘L’Aiguillon du désespoir’, Le Monde, 2 April 1975. 125 Défi, 195–9. 126 Note dated 15 February, CHR 167. 127 Note dated 22 December [1974], in a file labelled ‘Notes de travail janv.-août 1975’. 128 To Tenret, ‘On n’arrête pas d’apprendre.’ His first film, La Chair de l’orchidée, released in 1975, is based on James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. 129 Gilles Sandier, ‘Lear’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16 May 1975. 130 To Godard, Le Monde, 2 April 1975. 131 Simon to Thérèse Fournier, ‘La vedette de Chéreau c’est François, le fils de Michel Simon’, France-Soir, 21 October 1975. 132 Desarthe to Godard, ‘Le vertige calculé de Gérard Desarthe’, Le Monde, 22 October 1975. 133 Chéreau to Leonardini, ‘Une main qui ne tremble pas’, L’Humanité, 22 October 1975. 134 Peduzzi to Aslan, Chéreau, 49. 135 Glucksmann, Le Monde, 6 November 1975. The Renault buildings have been erased since, and replaced by a new arts centre, La Seine Musicale. 136 Temkine, Mettre en scène, 118, 119. 137 Chéreau, interview with Michel Boué, Huma-Dimanche, 2–8 March 1977.

224

NOTES

138 Chéreau, programme Villeurbanne, April 1975. 139 Aslan, ‘Les éléments d’une poétique’, Chéreau, 38.

Chapter 3 1

Chéreau, Preface to the TNP programme, 1977. Far from Hagondange, trans. Françoise Kourilsky and Nicholas Kepros (New York: Ubu Repertory Theatre Publications, 1984).

2

See Regnault, ‘Disputations’, in Aslan, 115–21, and text of the prologue, 123–35.

3

Chéreau to Antoine Lachand, ‘L’imaginaire historique’.

4

See the seminar of the CNRS research team THALIM dedicated to this creation, ‘Ecouter La Dispute (1973–74, 1976, 1977)’, dir. A-F. Benhamou and M-M. Mervant-Roux, ENS rue d’Ulm, 5 February 2014.

5

L’Unité, 25 October 1973.

6

Frédéric Deloffre, Une Préciosité nouvelle: Marivaux et le marivaudage (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971). See Gilles Sandier, ‘L’Eden selon Sade et Chéreau’, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 175, 16 November 1973. Bernard Dort, ‘Marivaux sauvage?’ Travail théâtral, no. 14, January–March 1974, reprinted in Théâtre en jeu Essais de critique 1970–1978 (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 153–61.

7

At Scene 3 in Marivaux’s one-act play.

8

See Gustave Larroumet, ‘Marivaux et Shakespeare’, in Marivaux: Sa vie et ses œuvres d’après de nouveaux documents (Geneva: Slatkine Repr., 1970), 293–7.

9

Odette Aslan, ‘Un spectacle/matrice’, in Chéreau, 101.

10 Interview with Jean-Paul Liégeois, L’Unité, 25 October 1973. Les Contes d’Hoffman, Opéra de Paris, 1974 to 1978. 11 Godard, Chéreau, 104–5. 12 Michel Cournot, ‘Patrice le courage, Chéreau la conscience’, Le Monde; Jean-Jacques Gautier, ‘La Dispute de Marivaux-Patrice Chéreau’, Le Figaro, 27 October 1973. 13 H. R., in La Croix, complains of ‘tripatouillages’, 11 November 1973. Guy Dumur, ‘Le cauchemar d’une nuit d’été’, Le Nouvel

NOTES

225

Observateur, 5 November, and Pierre-Bernard Marquet, ‘Supplément au voyage de Marivaux’, L’Education, 8 November, discuss Marivaux the philosopher. 14 Dort, ‘Marivaux “sauvage”?’ Travail théâtral, no. 14, January– March 1974, reprinted in Théâtre en jeu (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 15 Chéreau, TNP programme, Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, December 1976. 16 Interview with Laure Adler, ‘Semaine spéciale Chéreau’, 3/5 France-Culture, 11 November 2015. 17 David Lan, ‘Patrice Chéreau: directing in the shadow of death’, The Guardian, 12 December 2013. 18 Interview with Adler, France-Culture, 9 September 2013. The little girl was Judith Lacan’s daughter, Eve Miller. Richard Peduzzi made her question the title of his book, Là-bas, c’est dehors (Arles: Actes-Sud, 2014). 19 Chéreau, ‘Lorsque cinq ans seront passés’, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 85–177. 20 Interview with Michel Parouty, Opéra magazine, no. 86, July–August 2013. 21 Patrice Chéreau: Transversales. Théâtre, cinéma, opéra, interviews edited by Marie-Laure Blot (Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2010), 115. 22 See Boulez, ‘Court post-scriptum sur la fidélité’, in Pierre Boulez et al., Lulu / Alban Berg (Théâtre national de l’Opéra de Paris, J.-C. Lattès, 1979), 161–6. 23 André Lavignac, Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (Paris: Delagrave, 1897), 522. 24 Boulez, ‘A partir du présent, le passé’, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 29, 45. 25 In a letter to Lizst about the production of Lohengrin, 8 September 1850. 26 Voyage à Bayreuth, 508. 27 On the genesis, design and building of the set, see Peduzzi, Là-bas, 106–35. 28 The Making of the ‘Ring’, a documentary of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production, by Peter Weinberg and John Ardoin,

226

NOTES

Bayreuth, 1980. The documentary manages to revisit the history of the Bayreuth festival without any mention of the Hitler years. 29 Eleonore Büning’s obituary, ‘Nachruf auf Patrice Chéreau / Erschütterer der Opernwelt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 October 2013. 30 In The Wagnerian, 26 November 2014. 31 See below, Chapter 8, ‘Elektra’. These interviews were so unanimously gushing that Nussac did not include them in her book, for fear it would sound hagiographic. 32 Chéreau, ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 129; ‘Annexe’, 227. 33 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (London: NLB , 1981 [1952]), 134, 143, 90. 34 Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 174, 222, 228, 233. 35 Wagner, letter to Franz Liszt, 11 February 1853. 36 Georges Dumézil, Les Dieux des Germains (Paris: PUF, 1959). See Regnault, ‘Erudition’, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 107–9. Chéreau, ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 102. 37 G. B. Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (The Floating Press, 2011 [1898]), 23. The parallel with Shaw is pointed out for instance by William Mann, London Times critic, in The Making of the ‘Ring’. 38 Wagnerite, 27, 95, 28, 37. 39 Wagnerite, 40. 40 Hans Mayer, in Ammerkungen zu Richard Wagner (Bayreuth: Suhrkamp Verlag, Jaresheft, 1966). Chéreau, ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 90. 41 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 146–7. See Regnault, ‘Mime à la valise’, 149–51. 42 Der Jubiläums-Ring in Bayreuth 1976. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Neu-Inszenierung der Tetralogie zum hundertjährigen Bestehen der Festspiele (self-published, Berlin, 1976). English version, The Centenary Ring in Bayreuth (Berlin: Bote und Bock, 1977). 43 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 96. 44 Godard, Chéreau, 136. 45 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 100.

NOTES

227

46 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 96. 47 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 106. 48 ‘Lorsque cinq ans’, 100, 134–5. 49 J’y arriverai un jour, ed. Georges Banu and Clément HervieuLéger (Arles: Actes-Sud, 2009), 21. 50 Chéreau, ‘Annexe I’, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 233. 51 Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 51. 52 Chéreau, ‘Mythologie et idéologie’, programme of Rhinegold, Bayreuth, 1977, 23. 53 Peduzzi, ‘Construire ma peinture’, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 182. 54 ‘La mousse, l’écume’, 11–12, about the set of Massacre à Paris. 55 Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 226–7. See also Regnault, ‘Symbole et allégorie’, 127. 56 Chéreau’s commentary on ‘Mythologie et idéologie’, Bayreuth programme of Siegfried, 1977, 89, repr. in Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 227. 57 Chéreau, in Journal du Théâtre de La Ville, August 1981. 58 At Malmoë, in 1957. Peter Stein’s at the Schaubühne, in 1971. 59 At the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon. Paul Taylor, The Independent, 6 May 1994. 60 Aslan, Chéreau, 136–291. 61 Regnault, Peer Gynt, poème dramatique (Montreuil: éditions Théâtrales, 1996), 223. 62 Catherine Naugrette, ‘Patrice Chéreau’s Peer Gynt: A Renewed Reception of Ibsen’s Theater in France’, in Global Ibsen: Performing Multiple Modernities, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Barbara Gronau and Christel Weiler (New York: Routledge, 2011), 170. 63 Jean-Loup Rivière, ‘Music do I hear?’, Un musée, 186. 64 Interviews with Aslan, Chéreau, 197. 65 Reich’s lecture to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, 13 October 1920, ‘Libidinal conflicts and delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt’, trans. Philip Schmitz, in Early Writings (New York: Farrar, Strausss and Giroux, 1975), vol. I.

228

NOTES

66 In Peer Gynt: Matériaux, documents et commentaires. Texte intégral de la pièce, ed. Sylvie de Nussac and François Regnault (Paris: Beba, 1981), 7. 67 Letter of 26 September 1869 to his sister Hedwige Stoustand, Lettres, trans. Martine Rémusat (Paris: Plon, 1906), reprinted in Matériaux, 25. 68 Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur à son retour (‘Und warum sollten nicht die Farben Brüder der Schmerzen sein, da diese wie jene uns ins Exige ziehen?’ Briefe des Zurückgekherhen, 1907, ch. 5) in Lettres de Lord Chandos et autres essais, reprinted in Matériaux, 45. 69 Regnault, ‘Les pelures du soi’, Matériaux, 47. 70 Jolana Kubíková explores the parallels between the two productions in ‘Peer Gynt a Hamlet: dve˘ Chéreauovy jevištní metafory lidského úde˘lu’, Akademické studie Divadelní fakulty JAMU, 2013. 71 Interview with Aslan, Chéreau, 158. 72 4.i, 5.v, 5.x, Robert Farquharson Sharp’s translation (Everyman’s Library, 1921). 73 See Regnault, ‘Note sur l’image à défaire’, in Koltès and Regnault, La Famille des orties: esquisses et croquis autour des ‘Paravents’ de Jean Genet (Paris: Beba, 1983), 45. 74 ‘Rencontre avec les abonnés du Théâtre de la Ville’, 28 October 1981, reprinted in Aslan, 141. 75 Philippe Coutant, ‘Patrice Chéreau, les années Nanterre Amandiers’, unabridged paper for Patrice Chéreau à l’œuvre, ed. Marie-Françoise Lévy and Myriam Tsikunas (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016). 76 Défi, 51. 77 Interview with France Roche, 24 February 1983, http://fresques. ina.fr/en-scenes/fiche-media/Scenes00161/le-theatre-nanterreamandiers-dirige-par-patrice-chereau.html 78 Patrice Chéreau and Philippe Coutant, ‘Nanterre’, March 1990, quoting the project they had presented in 1982, Nanterre-Amandiers: Les années Chéreau 1982–1990, ed. Sylvie de Nussac (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1990), 335.

NOTES

229

79 Interview with Joëlle Gayot, ‘Changement de décor’, FranceCulture, 7 October 2013. 80 Jean-Pierre Coffe, a constant advocate of good healthy food and a future television star, was one of the Amandiers’ suppliers. 81 Corinne Bacharach was called in by Crombecque some six months before the opening, and remained Chéreau’s press agent until 1986. 82 Dort, ‘Un “personnage combattant” ou le paradoxe de Nanterre’, Nanterre-Amandiers, 11–12. 83 Chéreau, interview with Frédéric Martel, Magazine littéraire, 2001, reprinted in Mensuel, no. 395, October 2013, 20. 84 Godard, Chéreau, 179. 85 André Téchiné, L’Atelier, 1985. François Manceaux, Il était une fois 19 acteurs (Une expérience unique du théâtre des Amandiers), 1986–87: ‘Cinéma et Platonov dans Hôtel de France avec Patrice Chéreau’, ‘Autour de L’Amoureuse avec Jacques Doillon’, ‘Théâtre et Platonov à Avignon et Nanterre’. 86 Archives L’Express, unsigned, reprinted in his obituary notice, ‘Mort de Patrice Chéreau, l’amant magnifique’, 7 October 2013. 87 Nanterre-Amandiers: Les années Chéreau 1982–1990. 88 Chéreau, J’y arriverai, 17. 89 See Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Patrice Chéreau, le génie de la scène à l’épreuve de l’écran’, slate.fr, http://www.slate.fr/story/78690/ patrice-chereau-theatre-cinema, 8 October 2013. 90 IMEC , CHR 165, ‘Hamlet texte 2’. 91 Fabienne Pascaud, ‘Au théâtre, l’empreinte indélébile de Patrice Chéreau’, Télérama, 8 October 2013. 92 Laure Adler, ‘Semaine spéciale Chéreau’, 3/5, ‘Le cinéma’, France-Culture, 11 November 2015. 93 Agnès Jaoui, interview with Daphné Roulier, ‘La Vie est un Je’, France-Inter, 9 January 2016. 94 Reported by Banu, ‘Génération(s) Chéreau’, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Sorbonne nouvelle, 28 March 2014.

230

NOTES

Chapter 4 1

Crombecque managed the Festival d’Automne for eighteen years, with intervals at the Théâtre des Amandiers, and the Avignon Festival from 1985 to 1992.

2

Crombecque, recorded in Joëlle Gayot’s ‘Hommage à Alain Crombecque’, with Patrice Chéreau, France-Culture, 16 July 2010.

3

See Sandrine Montin, ‘Zucco/Hamlet: le fantôme de Shakespeare’, La Haine de Shakespeare, Sorbonne conference, dir. Elisabeth Angel-Perez and François Lecercle, December 2015.

4

Written in 1974, and republished by Editions de Minuit in 2006. On Koltès’s early relation with Shakespeare, see Brigitte Salino, Bernard-Marie Koltès (Paris: Stock, 2009), 35–6, 97–9, 158–9, 288, 302.

5

La Haine de Shakespeare, ed. Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Francois Recercle (Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017).

6

Vous avez dit ‘Hamlet’?, trans. D. Goy-Blanquet (Paris: Aubier/ Nanterre Amandiers, 1988), reprinted as Pour comprendre ‘Hamlet’: Enquête à Elseneur (Points Seuil, 1992).

7

Interview with Jacques Nerson, Le Nouvel Obs, 13 October 2009.

8

Created at Nanterre in January 1987, with Isaach de Bankolé playing the part of the Dealer that Chéreau would take on at his two revivals.

9

Chéreau, ‘Elseneur – Cambridge – Nanterre’, Pour comprendre ‘Hamlet’, 12.

10 Press conference in Avignon, 9 July 1988. 11 Regnault, ‘Passage de Koltès’, in Nanterre-Amandiers, 320–34. 12 In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, trans. Jeffrey Wainwright, in Koltès, Collected Plays, vol. II (London: Methuen, 2004). 13 See Deborah S. Reisinger, Crime and Media in Contemporary France (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2007), ch. 4. 14 Reisinger, Crime, 69.

NOTES

231

15 In his last interview, with Lucien Attoun, Le Monde, 6 February 1992, trans. Reisinger, 79. 16 Chéreau did not share Reisinger’s opinion that this play does not significantly differ from his other works, drawing like them ‘on themes of solitude and nothingness’ (78). Reisinger mistranslates ‘procès d’intention’, which does not mean proceedings, but suspicion about motives (82). 17 Chéreau/Koltès: Une rencontre, document filmed by François Koltès, 2 March 1995. 18 See Cyril Desclès, L’affaire Koltès (Paris: L’Œil d’or, 2015), and below, Chapter 5. 19 Birigtte Salino, Bernard-Marie Koltès (Paris: Stock, 2010), 313–14. 20 ‘Sous la table’, Scene 3, Roberto Zucco (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), 28. 21 Interview with Martel, 20. 22 J’y arriverai, 20–21. 23 Dort’s view, ‘Un “personnage combattant” ’, NanterreAmandiers, 13–14. 24 Koltès, Une part de ma vie. Entretiens (1983–1989) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1999), 89. 25 Une part, 90. 26 Une part, 151. 27 ‘Notes sur Le Conte d’hiver’, in Voix de Koltès, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Séguier, 2004), 202–7. 28 Léonardini, for one, wrote in L’Humanité that his use of today’s vernacular failed to recreate the saucy vigour of Shakespeare’s idiom and its layers of conflicting flavours. 29 Interview with Martel. 30 J’y arriverai, 20–21. 31 CHR 165, Texte intégral (2). 32 Press conference, Avignon, 9 July 1988. 33 Déprats, ‘Traduire Shakespeare pour le théâtre’, Palimpsestes, no. 1 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1987), 57. 34 Anthony Curtis, Financial Times, 20 July 1988.

232

NOTES

35 Stéphanie Roesler’s doctoral thesis on ‘Yves Bonnefoy et Hamlet’, McGill University, Montreal, August 2009, 24. The changes made in 1988 are discussed with only a passing reference to Chéreau’s production. 36 Roesler, 183, 195–7. 37 After several conversations, Bonnefoy answered a list of questions in writing, 9 November 2015. 38 See for instance his Shakespeare: Théâtre et poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 39 ‘L’irrésistible ascension de Patrice Chéreau’, interview with Dumur, Nouvel Observateur, 8–14 July 1988. 40 ‘Readiness, Ripeness: Hamlet, Lear’, in Shakespeare and the French Poet, ed. John Naughton (Chicago University Press, 2004), trans. from Théâtre et poésie: Shakespeare et Yeats (Mercure de France, 1998), 14, 15. 41 Bonnefoy, ‘La poétique de Shakespeare’, Lieux et destins de l’image. Un cours de poétique au Collège de France 1981–1993 (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 83–5. 42 Cours de poétique, 28. It is a recurrent feature in Bonnefoy’s poetics and his reflections on Hamlet. See his latest essay, L’Hésitation d’Hamlet et la décision de Shakespeare (Paris: Seuil, 2015). 43 Desarthe, ‘Rencontre avec un comédien’, La Cie Vagabond au Magasin, 7 April 2005. 44 So he told Philippe Calvario, coaching him in the part in 1998. 45 Chéreau, in Godard, 199. 46 His Hamlet was republished by Mercure de France in 1962, Gallimard Folio in 1978, and Mercure de France again in 1988. 47 Bonnefoy, ‘Le lieu, l’heure, la mise en scène’, in NanterreAmandiers, 15–19. 48 ‘Le lieu’, 19. 49 ‘Le lieu’, 20. 50 CHR 165, ‘Texte, brochures de travail’ 1 to 6. 51 In a private interview, and in his ‘Être ou n’être pas’, Patrice Chéreau à l’œuvre, 245. Also erroneous is his claim that Chéreau

NOTES

233

was ‘not interested’ in Dover Wilson’s book, which he read closely, partly disagreed with, and quoted frequently in rehearsals. 52 ‘Yves Bonnefoy: “Il faudrait jouer Shakespeare dans le noir” ’, interview with Fabienne Darge, Le Monde, 24 April 2014. 53 Email of 9 November 2015. 54 Benhamou, Figurer, 43–4. 55 In a letter to Peduzzi, 8 May 1989. 56 Godard, 198. 57 Centre National du Costume de Scène, Moulins, 14 June 2014 to 4 January 2015, dir. Delphine Pinasa, curators Catherine Treilhou-Balaudé and Anne Verdier. Fortinbras’s costume was chosen for the poster of the exhibition. 58 See Chéreau, ‘Elseneur’, 10–11. 59 Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux, L’Assise du théâtre: pour une étude du spectateur (Paris: CNRS , 1998), 64, 117. 60 Benhamou, Figurer, 43–5. 61 Interview with Brigitte Paulino-Neto, during the revival at the Grande Halle de la Villette, ‘Patrice Chéreau: Fin de partie’, Libération, 1 December 1989. 62 Interview, Paulino-Neto. 63 Interview, Dumur. 64 Interview, Paulino-Neto. 65 Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller and James Hulbert, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, Yale French Studies, no. 55/56, 1977, 11–52. 66 Lacan, ‘Desire’, 39, 44. 67 Valéry, ‘Letters from France: I. The spiritual crisis’, The Atheneum, 11 April 1919, 184. 68 Andreas Höfele, ‘Elsinore – Berlin: Hamlet in the Twenties’, keynote lecture, Shakespeare 450, Odéon, 21 April 2014, in Actes de la Société Française Shakespeare (Paris, 2015), https://shakespeare.revues.org/3033 69 Serres, ‘Père et fils’, in Petites Chroniques du dimanche soir, 2 (Paris: Le Pommier, 2007), 30–2.

234

NOTES

70 Interview with Brigitte Salino, ‘Pourquoi et comment monter Phèdre de Racine’, Le Monde, 14 January 2003. 71 Desarthe, ‘Être ou n’être pas’, 247. 72 Antenne 2, 23 September 1989. Archives Odéon, cote VID 237/VID 237 b. 73 A. Bartochevitch, in Mervant-Roux, L’Assise du théâtre, 209. 74 Mervant-Roux, L’Assise du théâtre, 211–13. 75 Visages, 193. 76 See Benhamou, Figurer, 49–56. 77 Godard, 225. 78 Histoire d’un ‘Ring’, 121. 79 Chéreau, Press conference, Avignon, 9 July 2016. 80 To Nicolas Treatt, December 1983, Chéreau (Paris: Liko, 1984), 120. 81 To Aslan, 15 March 1984, Chéreau, 316. 82 ‘Hommage à Alain Crombecque’, France-Culture, 16 July 2010. 83 Godard, 199. 84 Les Enfants de Chéreau: Une école de comédiens (Arles: Actes-Sud Papiers, 2015), 138. 85 Figurer, 67–8. 86 The photographer François-Marie Banier would be involved in a major scandal in 2008 when Liliane Bettencourt’s daughter sued him for an ‘abus de faiblesse’ and gifts amounting to a billion euros. 87 To Aslan, 14 October 1983, Chéreau, 59. 88 Interview with Fabienne Darge, Le Monde, 3 March 2013. 89 ‘Entretien autour de Hamlet’ with Jean-Michel Déprats, in Shakespeare et la guerre (Paris: Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare, 1990), 157–60. 90 Pierre Marcabru for one; ‘Un conteur nommé Chéreau’, Le Figaro, 11 July 1988. 91 V.T., ‘Renucci en quête de Claudius’, Libération, 14 July 1988. 92 Banu, J’y arriverai, 40.

NOTES

235

93 Marine Landrot, ‘Petit précis de la méthode Chéreau’, Télérama, 18 January 2003. 94 Chéreau, ‘Elseneur’, 10. 95 CHR 165, Texte (2). 96 Citti, Les enfants de Chéreau, 66–7, 143. 97 ‘Le metteur en scène’, in Christian Biet and Christophe Triau, Qu’est-ce que le théâtre? (Paris: Folio, 2009), 36–7.

Chapter 5 1

André Müller, ‘Interview mit Patrice Chéreau’, Der Zeit, 16 April 1988, private translation by Hélène Bénaiche.

2

In his review for Der Spiegel, ‘Lulu oder Der Riß durchs Menschengeschlecht’, 5 March 1979. On Chéreau’s ‘queer’ films, his attitude to AIDS and his tense relationship with the gay community, see Nick Reeds-Roberts, French Queer Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 83–8, 114–15.

3

Benhamou, Figurer, 40–2.

4

See Regnault, ‘Note sur l’image à défaire’, 45.

5

Quartett, translated by Jean Jourdheuil, Amandiers, April–June 1985.

6

In Avignon, 26 July 2013. He first read it, directed by Thierry Thieû Niang, in Salonika, then at the Odéon in April 2009, and again during the Louvre exhibition. See below, Chapter 8.

7

See Godard, 132. On the layers of Courbet’s painting in L’Homme blessé and the parallels with Chéreau’s filming, see Bertrand Tillier, ‘Leçons de Courbet’, Chéreau à l’œuvre, 358–60.

8

Godard, 39.

9

Julianne Pidduck, though, defines him as ‘an openly gay director’, La Reine Margot: Patrice Chéreau, 1994 (London: Tauris, 2005), 17. If he does depict ‘intense and physical relationships between men’, this applies equally well to all the relationships he depicts.

10 Pierre Boulez, ‘Témoignage’, L’Avant-Scène Opéra, no. 281, Patrice Chéreau: Opéra et mise en scène, July–August 2014, 47.

236

NOTES

11 A.-F. Benhamou, ‘ “Avons-nous besoin d’un lieu qui ne serait qu’un théâtre?” Patrice Chéreau à Nanterre’, Chéreau à l’œuvre, 193–4. 12 Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, Preface to Journal du voleur (Gallimard, 1952). 13 Genet, Lettres à Roger Blin (Gallimard/NRF, 1966). 14 See the contrasting reviews of Poirot-Delpech in Le Monde, 23 April 1966, and Jean-Jacques Gautier in Le Figaro, same date. 15 Malraux’s speech in Parliament, 27 October 1966, quoting Baudelaire’s ‘Charogne’ to answer their accusations of ‘pourriture’, online at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/ histoire/7ek.asp 16 Chéreau to Gilles Costaz, ‘Chéreau-Genet: La rencontre de deux trouble-fête’, Le Matin de Paris, 7 June 1983. 17 See Aslan, ‘Les Paravents’, Chéreau, 292–317. 18 Aslan, ‘Les Paravents’, 311. 19 Aslan, ‘Entretien avec Didier Sandre’, 15 March 1984, 316. 20 Regnault, ‘Sur Les Paravents’, Nanterre-Amandiers, 36. 21 Aslan, ‘Entretien’, 317. 22 Interview with Marianne Alphant, Libération, 14 December 1983, in Aslan, 316. 23 ‘Patrice Chéreau, fin de partie’, interview with Brigitte PaulinoNeto, Libération, 1 December 1989. Benhamou, ‘Avons-nous besoin’, 193, thinks he only discovered this on the way, and later turned the creation of Combat de nègre into a manifesto. 24 Koltès, Une part de ma vie, Entretiens (1983–1989) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1999), 11. 25 Entretiens, 72. 26 Combat de nègre et de chiens (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), includes Koltès’s Carnets. Arthur Nauzyciel directed an English version of the play, Black Battles with Dogs, in Atlanta in 2001. 27 Chéreau/Koltès: Une rencontre, filmed by François Koltès, 1995. 28 Chéreau/Koltès. 29 Cyril Desclés, L’affaire Koltès.

NOTES

237

30 See Guylaine Massoutre’s detailed account of the production on tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Jeu: Revue de théâtre, no. 81, 1996, 190–4. Their pas-de-deux to the tune of Massive Attack’s ‘Karmacoma’, which she compares to a nuptial parade, became a cult scene on video. 31 Les Visages et Les Corps. 32 Chéreau read it in Salonica and Rome, at the Odéon on 29 April 2009, then again as part of the Louvre exhibition (see below, Chapter 7), and at Théâtre de la Ville, 13 and 17 September 2012. 33 Rêve d’automne was performed in the Louvre from 2 November 2010 to 31 January 2011, then for a month at Théâtre de la Ville in Richard Peduzzi’s setting. 34 ‘Patrice Chéreau en son temps’, Bibiothèques de l’Odéon, 21 November 2016.

Chapter 6 1

Godard, 167.

2

‘La mousse, l’écume’, 16–17.

3

‘Faire du théâtre ne va plus de soi’, J’y arriverai, 16–18.

4

L’Ecole des comédiens, 1982–1987, ed. Marianne MerleauPonty (Nanterre-Amandiers, 1987).

5

Chéreau, masterclass with Anne-Françoise Benhamou, complete text transcribed by Philippe Coutant, Nantes, Maison de la Culture, 25 October 2002. Benhamou gives extracts in ‘Avons-nous besoin’, 302–6.

6

Armelle Héliot, ‘École de comédiens’, Nanterre-Amandiers, 78–9.

7

It was screened at the Cannes Festival in the section ‘Un certain regard’. Interview for Antenne 2, 17 August 1987; fresques.ina.fr.

8

‘Hommage à Alain Crombecque’.

9

Citti, Les Enfants de Chéreau, 137–8.

10 Treilhou-Balaudé, ‘Le choix du théâtre’, 206. 11 J’y arriverai, 47.

238

NOTES

12 Mathilde la Bardonnie, ‘Emilfork s’est réveillé mort’, Libé, 19 October 2006. 13 Citti, 70–1. Christine Citti, his elder sister, was one of the first class of students. 14 Anne-Marie Fijal, L’Ecole des comédiens, 20. 15 ‘L’Echange américain’, L’Ecole des comédiens, 57–63, and Jaoui’s interview with Eva Bester, France-Inter, 3 January 2016. 16 These works are recorded in François Manceaux’ documentary film, Il était une fois 19 acteurs, September 1986. 17 Marc Citti, Marianne Denicourt, Thibaud de Montalembert, Foued Nassah, Bernard Nissile, Vincent Pérez, Bruno Todeschini, plus an eighth from the first class, Olivier Rabourdin. 18 Chéreau, ‘Avec les élèves de Nanterre’, Le Monde, 4 October 1984. 19 Interview with Monique Le Roux, ‘Il ne faut pas que les mises en scène se patinent’, Journal du cargo, Maison de la Culture de Grenoble, no. 5, October 1987. 20 IMEC , ‘Comme il vous plaira’, CHR 44.3. 21 Another typescript, annotated by Chéreau, CHR 44.5. 22 Le Prince, ch. 18, and the first lines of stanza 8 on ‘the European Headsman’ in Leaves of Grass. 23 This translation was later included in the Pléiade edition of Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare, ed. J-M. Déprats and Gisèle Venet (Paris: Gallimard, 2002–2016). 24 Changes recorded in Loayza’s annotated typescripts of Henry VI and Richard III. 25 Nantes masterclass, 25 October 2002, after a screening of extracts from Fragments. 26 Stéphane Metge, La leçon de théâtre, Patrice Chéreau, Henry VI/ Richard III, documentary, diff. ARTE , December 1999. 27 Creation of Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Festival d’Avignon, 1984. Richard Eyre’s Richard III with Ian McKellen was performed at the Odéon in January 1990. 28 Lesson 1, ‘Travail à la table’.

NOTES

239

29 Benhamou, Figurer, 14. 30 René Solis, ‘Chéreau, chef d’atelier’, Libération, 13 November 1998. 31 Benhamou, Figurer, 46. 32 Lesson 2, ‘Scène de groupe’. 33 Lesson 5, ‘Paroles d’élèves’.

Chapter 7 1

Chéreau, Visages, 5–56.

2

Letter dated 3 October 1989 to François Regnault, asking him to contribute a paper on Koltès to the projected NanterreAmandiers book.

3

See Aslan, Chéreau, 84–5.

4

See Samuel Blumenfeld, ‘ “L’homme blessé”, un film atypique dans le paysage du cinéma français’, Les Inrockuptibles, 1 January 1995.

5

Chéreau, Press Review, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, 1987.

6

Master Class Patrice Chéreau, interview with Pascal Mérigeau on his filmography, Forum des Images, 17 March 2013.

7

‘The sweat of blood’, Queen Margot, trans. Alfred R. Allinson (London: Methuen, 1904) ii, xiii, 131, 130. In the English version, she ‘told herself’ this at each occurrence of the phenomenon, but in Dumas’ original, ‘elle lui disait sans cesse’, she kept repeating it to the king.

8

‘La Reine Margot au cinéma: Jean Dréville (1954) et Patrice Chéreau (1994)’, in Femmes de pouvoir: mythes et fantasmes, ed. Odile Krakovitch, Geneviève Sellier and Eliane Viennot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 205–18.

9

Sellier, 214.

10 Thierry Wanegffelen for one, author of a biography of Catherine de Medici, denounced his disregard for history in ‘Arrêtons le massacre! La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau’, Études, no. 14, vol. 381, July–August 1994, 31–3. 11 ‘L’imaginaire historique’.

240

NOTES

12 Mémoires et Lettres de Marguerite de Valois, ed. M.F. Guessard (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1842), based on Les Mémoires de la royne Marguerite (Paris: Charles Chappelain, 1628). 13 Chéreau, ‘Director’s notes’, La Reine Margot, English press book, 1994, 2. 14 Written in French, January 1580, to Alençon, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, Part II , 1572–1582 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1899), 299, trans. in Berry, John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf, Introduction, xviii. 15 ‘Director’s notes’. 16 Interview Benjamin MiNiMum © Mondomix, May 2010. World premiere in the Basilica next to the Valois tomb at the Festival de musique de Saint-Denis, 7 June 2010. 17 Julianne Pidduck, La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) (Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 2005), 17. 18 On his disregard for the contemporary studies of ‘sacred violence’, and the historians’ angry reactions, see Antoine de Baecque, ‘Chéreau dans l’Histoire? Filmer la violence dans La Reine Margot’, Chéreau à l’œuvre, 257–64. 19 ‘L’imaginaire historique’. 20 Musée, 28. 21 Jack Lang, Musée, 47. 22 By Charles Isherwood, ‘ “From the House of the Dead”: The Director’s Style’, New York Times, 10 November 2009. 23 Thompson, ‘Une grande salle vide’ / ‘An empty auditorium’, Musée, 198. 24 It is this version, twenty minutes shorter than the original, that is available on DVD. 25 See Violette Rouchy-Lévy, ‘Queen Margot vs La Reine Margot: la version américaine du film de Patrice Chéreau’, 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 52, 2007, online at http://1895.revues.org/1042 26 Chéreau’s letter to Miramax, 20 September 1994, reprinted in Rouchy-Lévy. 27 Jacqueline Nacache, ‘Tu ne pleureras point: l’évitement du mélodrame dans La Reine Margot’, journée d’études,

NOTES

241

28 February 2015, online at http://ufrlac.lac.univ-paris-diderot. fr/CERILAC_WEB/margot/Jacqueline_Nacache.wav 28 Jules César was created at the Comédie de Genève in 1990, Die Zeit und das Zimmer in Berlin in 1989, and Le Temps et la Chambre at the Odéon in 1991. 29 ‘La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau’, Ciné-club, no. 56, 4 October 2016. 30 ‘L’imaginaire historique’. 31 Chéreau played the French general Montcalm opposite DayLewis’s Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans (1992). 32 Pidduck, Margot, 79. 33 Mathilde Blottière, ‘Sur Arte, La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau, film monstre’, Télérama, 10 April 2016. 34 Master Class Patrice Chéreau, 2002. 35 Nantes masterclass. 36 Interview with Clare Shine, ‘No easy option’, Financial Times, 29 April 2011. 37 See Dan Glaister, ‘Rival films portray life of Napoleon’, The Guardian, 1 April 2004. 38 Master Class Patrice Chéreau. 39 Interview with Czech journalists at the Karlovy Vary Festival, reported by Agence France Presse, 4 July 2009. 40 ‘No easy option’. 41 Interview with Louis Guichard, Télérama, 25 April 2009. 42 Santander seminar, Musée, 7 August 2013, 353. 43 Pierre Trividic, ‘Pères et fils’, Chéreau à l’œuvre, 286. 44 Nantes masterclass. 45 A novel, Intimacy (1998) and a short story, ‘Nightlight’, Love in a Blue Time (1997). 46 Nantes masterclass. 47 Kristin Hohenadel’s interview with Rylance, ‘Peeling Back the Layers of a Man, Clothes and All’, The New York Times, 14 October 2001.

242

NOTES

48 Alexander Linklater, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, The Guardian, 22 June 2001. A longer version was published in the July issue of Prospect magazine. 49 Louis Guichard, Télérama, 28 March 2001. Frédéric Bonnaud, Les Inrocks, 30 November 2000. 50 Interview with Laurent Rigoulet, ‘Dans l’“intimité” de Chéreau. A Londres et en anglais’, Libération, 22 March 2000. 51 Translated by Simon Stephens from Eg er vinden. 52 Created in Avignon, 1954, revived for the tenth Avignon festival in 1956. 53 Interview with Jean-François Perrier, http://www.theatrecontemporain.net/spectacles/I-Am-the-Wind/ensavoirplus/ idcontent/23157 54 Email from Rylance’s assistant, 23 September 2016. 55 Chéreau’s diary, Visages, 39. 56 Jon Fosse, interviewed by Brian Logan, ‘Jon Fosse: All the world loves his plays. Why don’t we?’ The Independent on Sunday, 1 May 2011. 57 Jack Laskey, interview with Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2011. 58 Andrew Haydon, ‘Does Britain have a problem with European theatre?’ The Guardian, 12 May 2011. 59 Judith Sibony, ‘Rien que des mots, version Chéreau’, Le Monde Blogs, 6 June 2011. 60 Autumn 2010. The full programme, fifty pages, is available online at http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/medias/medias_ fichiers/fichiers/pdf/louvre-dossier-presse-patrice-chereau.pdf 61 Vincent Huguet’s transcript, ‘First seminar, last summer’, Un Musée, 357. 62 Chéreau, ‘Ce Louvre où j’habitais enfant’, Les Visages et les Corps, 41. 63 Daniel Loayza, ‘Coma’, UBU Scènes d’Europe / European Stages, ‘Exil(e)s’, no. 45, June 2009, 81. 64 Monique Le Roux, ‘Patrice Chéreau: les visages et les corps’, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 1028, 16 December 2010.

NOTES

243

65 Interview with Jean-François Perrier, ‘Entretien avec Patrice Chéreau et Thierry Thieû Niang’, Dossier de Presse, Festival d’Avignon, July 2011. 66 Chéreau, ‘Un rêve en automne’, 10 June 2010, programme of Théâtre de la Ville. 67 See her interview, quoted above in Chapter 3, on France-Culture, ‘Semaine spéciale Patrice Chéreau’, 3/5, ‘Le cinéma’, 11 November 2015. 68 ‘Semaine spéciale’, 2/5, ‘Les comédiennes’, 10 November 2015. 69 Interview with Laure Adler, France-Culture, Hors-champs, 9 September 2013.

Chapter 8 1

Nijinski, Cahiers, trans. Christian Dumais-Lvowski and Galina Pogojeva (Arles: Actes-Sud, 1995). The Diary of Vaslav Nijinski (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000).

2

Rosita Boisseau, ‘Le Sacre des seniors’, Le Monde, 12 September 2012.

3

See for instance Pierre-Emmanuel Lephay’s review for Forum Opéra, ‘Un exceptionnel moment de théâtre’, 20 July 2007.

4

Chéreau, interview with Philip Brieler, ‘Sound, & Vision: Chéreau and Salonen Chat about the Met’s From the House of the Dead’, Playbill Arts, 2 November 2009.

5

Michael Miller, ‘Janácˇek’s From the House of the Dead, after Dostoevsky, Patrice Chéreau director, at the Metropolitan Opera’, New York Arts, 4 December 2008, rev. 4 April 2012.

6

MusicalCriticism.com, 30 November 2009.

7

Anthony Tommasini, ‘Two Debuts, Overdue and Overwhelming’, The New York Times, 13 November 2009.

8

‘Esa-Pekka Salonen on Patrice Chéreau’, interview with Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 14 December 2013.

9

Chéreau’s answer to Hervieu-Léger, Visages, 199. See also his interview with Ali Baddou, France-Culture, 27 April 2009, http://www.fabriquedesens.net/Patrice-Chereau-invite-des-Matins

10 Hernandez, e-mail of 16 August 2016.

244

NOTES

11 25 March 2013, broadcast by France-Culture 31 March, readings from Shakespeare, Koltès, Hofmannsthal, Rimbaud, Büchner, Hervé Guibert and Aslı Erdog˘an. 12 The production was to open at Odéon/Ateliers Berthier in April 2014. 13 ‘Chéreau: Pourquoi et comment monter Phèdre de Racine’, interview with Brigitte Salino, Le Monde, 14 January 2003. 14 Nantes masterclass, held three weeks before he began rehearsing Phèdre. 15 Racine, Préface, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 1677, ed. Ernest Gwénola and Paul Fièvre, 2015, http://www.theatre-classique.fr/pages/pdf/ RACINE_PHEDRE.pdf 16 The Œillets of its name are not carnations, but the little rivets that used to be manufactured there. 17 2.v, trans. A.S. Kline, 2003, who misinterprets ‘objet’, i.e. the loved one, as ‘aim’. 18 ‘Semaine Chéreau,’ 4/5 ‘Textes classiques et contemporains’, France-Culture, 12 November 2015. 19 Regnault wrote a short essay with Jean-Claude Milner, entitled Dire le vers: Court traité à l’intention des acteurs et des amateurs d’alexandrins (Paris: Seuil, 1987, reprinted Verdier, 2008). 20 Antonio Cuenca Ruiz, ‘Chéreau répète Elektra: les notes du stagiaire’, Avant-Scène Opéra, no. 281, 96–101. 21 ‘Interview with Patrice Chéreau’, recorded at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, summer 2013, Bonus of the Elektra Bel Air Classique DVD. 22 Sylvie de Nussac, on Meier’s interpretation of Klytemnästra. 23 In various writings, and in a letter of 28 June 1912 to Richard Strauss. Karen Forsyth, ‘Hoffmansthal’s “Elektra”: from Sophocles to Strauss’, in Richard Strauss: Elektra, ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20, thinks Hofmannsthal read Freud but ‘Hamlet is arguably the most important “secondary source” for Elektra.’ 24 Guido Paduano, ‘Electra and Hamlet’, in Myths of Europe, ed. Richard Littlejohn and Sara Soncini (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 42, n. 13.

NOTES

245

25 Quoted by Forsyth, 24. 26 Chéreau, text for the Odéon programme, 16 April 2013. 27 Four scripts: Supervielle’s translation, a heavily corrected photocopy of Bonnefoy’s which served as the basis, the ‘Texte de travail’ read at the Odéon, dated May 2013, and the last ‘Texte de travail’, with the date 23 September 2013 amended in pencil to ‘October’, both of which carry further punctual corrections, the last ones after a working session with Bonnefoy in late September. 28 Handwritten notes on the front page of the Bonnefoy copy. Comme il vous plaira (Paris: Le livre de poche, 2003), Preface, 22. 29 Comme il vous plaira, 90 n. 2. 30 Comme il vous plaira, 120 n. 2. A note to ‘Who could be out?’, 137, detects ‘erotic undertones but not very clear ones’, equally shared between Orlando and Rosalind. 31 Jean Starobinski, L’Encre de la mélancolie (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 623. 32 L’Encre de la mélancolie, 186, 192–3, 222–4. See also the section on Yves Bonnefoy, ‘La “tache noire” dans l’image’, 331–7. 33 Comme il vous plaira, 160 n. 1. 34 In an email to Vincent Huguet while writing the programme, 20 March 2013. 35 At 4.3.158, Celia’s ‘Cousin – Ganymede’ becomes ‘cousine’, which Chéreau amended to the French masculine, ‘cousin’, and he cut Bonnefoy’s ‘bien que je me dise une magicienne’ at 5.2.69. 36 Orlando furioso, guarito: de l’Arioste à Shakespeare (Paris: Mercure de France, 2013). 37 ‘Une décision de Shakespeare’, Orlando furioso, guarito, 107–20.

Chapter 9 1

In Action, 11 May 1945, reprinted in Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard NRF, 1979), 324–6.

246

NOTES

2

Programme note of Richard II, Avignon Festival, 1982.

3

Racine, Iphigénie, 1.1. Voltaire, ‘Art dramatique’, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Furne, 1835), vol. VII , 181. Voltaire on Shakespeare (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 201.

4

Stendhal’s article of 1822 in the Paris Monthly Review of British and Continental Literature became Chapter 1 of his Racine et Shakespeare (Paris, 1823).

5

Private interview at the Comédie-Française, 25 May 2016.

6

‘Shakespeare lives’ at the British Embassy in Paris, 21 April 2016, and ‘Hommage à Shakespeare’, Comédie-Française, 23 April 2016.

7

Denis Podalydès, Album Shakespeare (Paris: Pléiade Gallimard, 2016), 211–13.

8

Banu, ‘Avignon: Krystian Lupa ou le combat des corps et des mots’, Arts & Scènes, 18 July 2016.

9

Hervieu-Léger, ‘J’ai appris de Patrice que rien n’est détail’, Chéreau à l’œuvre, 338.

10 ‘Ivo Van Hove et La Source vive’, interview with Xavier de La Porte, France-Culture, 14 July 2014. 11 Lyn Gardner, ‘Kings of War review – Shakespeare with shock and awe’, The Guardian, 21 June 2015. 12 In Avignon, July to October 2015. 13 Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, Mediapart, 27 June 2015. 14 Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Le parcours de Chéreau. Transsubstantiation’, slate.fr, 20 July 2015. 15 Respectively in Journal du Dimanche, 14 October 2013, Elle, 5 November 2013, Ouest France, 19 January 2014. 16 Sylviane Bernard Gresh, Télérama Sortir, 30 October 2013. 17 Interview with Joëlle Gayot, Changement de décor, FranceCulture, 1 June 2014. 18 Interview with Laetitia Cénac, Figaro madame, 4 September 2015.

NOTES

247

19 Interview with Thomas Baurez, L’Express, 13 September 2013. Another less harmonious link connects him with Chéreau, his marriage to Marianne Denicourt, who took him to court for attempts against her private life in Rois et Reine. 20 ‘Maîtrise / Mastery’, in Un musée imaginaire, 273. 21 Chéreau à l’œuvre, 342.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Aslan, Odette, ed. Chéreau. De Sartrouville à Nanterre; La Dispute; Peer Gynt; Les Paravents; Le théâtre lyrique, Les Voies de la création théâtrale, vol. XIV, CNRS , 1986. Banu, Georges and Clément Hervieu-Léger, J’y arriverai un jour / Patrice Chéreau, Actes Sud, 2009. Bataillon, Michel, Un défi en province: chronique d’une aventure théâtrale: Chéreau, Planchon, et leurs invités: TNP, Théâtre national populaire, 1972–1986, Marval, 2005. Benhamou, Anne-Françoise, Patrice Chéreau: Figurer le réel, Les Solitaires intempestifs, 2015. Blot, Marie-Laure, ed. Patrice Chéreau: transversales: théâtre, cinéma, opéra, Le Bord de l’eau, 2010. Chéreau, Patrice, Si tant est que l’opéra soit du théâtre: notes sur la mise en scène de la création mondiale de l’oeuvre intégrale d’Alban Berg, Ombres, 1990. — Lorsque cinq ans seront passés: sur le ‘Ring’ de Richard Wagner, Bayreuth, 1976–1980, Ombres, 1994. —, Pierre Boulez et al., Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: der Ring des Nibelungen de Richard Wagner, ed. Sylvie de Nussac, Bayreuth, 1976–1980, Librairie générale française, 1981. — and Claude Stratz, ‘Elseneur – Cambridge – Nanterre’, Foreword to Vous avez dit Hamlet?, Aubier / Amandiers, 1988 (repr. Pour comprendre ‘Hamlet’, Seuil, 1992). —, Vincent Huguet and Clément Hervieu-Léger, Les visages et les corps, catalogue exposition Louvre, Paris, Skira Flammarion, 2010. Citti, Marc, Les Enfants de Chéreau: Une école de comédiens, Actes-Sud, 2015. Dort, Bernard, Théâtre réel: essais de critique 1967–1970, Seuil, 1971. Godard, Colette, Patrice Chéreau: un trajet, Editions du Rocher, 2007.

250

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lévy, Marie-Françoise and Myriam Tsikounas, eds, Patrice Chéreau à l’œuvre, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016. Marquet Aude, ed., Patrice Chéreau: un musée imaginaire/ An imaginary museum, catalogue de l’exposition, Collection Lambert, Actes Sud, 2015. Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine, L’Assise du théâtre: pour une étude du spectateur, CNRS Editions, 1998. Metge, Stéphane, La leçon de théâtre, Patrice Chéreau, Henry VI/ Richard III, documentaire en cinq parties, diff. ARTE , Dec. 1999. Nussac, Sylvie de, ed. Nanterre Amandiers, les années Chéreau, 1982–1990, Imprimerie nationale, 1991. — and François Regnault, Peer Gynt: Matériaux, documents et commentaires. Texte intégral de la pièce, Beba, 1981. Patrice Chéreau: un musée imaginaire, Collection Lambert, ActesSud, 2015. Peduzzi, Richard, Là-bas, c’est dehors, Actes Sud, 2014. Pidduck, Julianne, La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994), Tauris, 2005. Temkine, Raymonde, ‘Patrice Chéreau’, in Mettre en scène au présent, vol. II , L’Âge d’homme, 1979. Weinberg, Peter and John Ardoin, The Making of the ‘Ring’, a documentary of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production, Bayreuth, 1980.

INDEX

actors 2, 5, 11, 13–14, 21–5, 37–9, 45–9, 52, 54, 58–9, 63, 67–8, 74–5, 77, 84–6, 88–9, 94, 102, 104–12, 114, 118–20, 124, 127, 130, 141–2, 144, 152–3, 155, 157, 160–2, 165–8, 170–72, 177, 180–1, 185, 187, 190–2, 195 Adjani, Isabelle 66, 84, 148, 150, 153, 162, 171 Algeria 6, 12, 15, 47, 118–20, 150, 153 Amstutz, Roland 77, 86, 89 Anglade, Jean-Hugues 128, 144 Angrémy, Jean-Pierre 80 Ariosto, Ludovico 183 Artaud, Antonin 18, 26 Aslan, Odette 29, 35, 66, 119 Ateliers Berthier 124, 170, 177, 180 Attoun, Lucien 2, 7, 25, 55–6, 165–6 Avignon 12, 15, 29, 30, 54, 82–4, 87–90, 92–3, 101, 106, 108, 110, 126–7, 187, 190–1, 193 Bacharach, Corinne 81–2 Ballet, Bernard 94, 102, 110–11 Banu, Georges 39, 66

Barenboim, Daniel 15, 72, 160, 214 n. 43 Barrault, Jean-Louis 3, 30, 39, 219 n. 53 Barthes, Roland 29, 169 Bataillon, Michel 1, 30, 54–5 Baudelaire, Charles 69, 236 n. 15 Beauvoir, Simone de 41, 187 Beckett, Samuel 3, 23, 54, 58, 159 Bellmer, Hans 63 Bengell, Norma 62 Benhamou, Anne-Françoise 37, 100, 107, 115, 117, 139 Berg, Alban 13, 15, 61, 66, 113, 160 Bergman, Ingmar 4–6, 67, 74, 144 Berlin 20, 54, 60, 83, 103, 107, 129, 143, 191, 241 Berliner Ensemble x, 4, 10, 15, 212 n. 14 Bertin, Roland 62, 115 Bickel, Moidele 89, 152, 168 Birkin, Jane 106, 153 Blanc, Dominique 77, 124, 154, 155, 170 Blin, Roger 3, 39, 118, 120 Bond, Edward 2, 4, 20, 30, 54–60, 71–2 Bondy, Luc 15, 83, 88, 90, 92, 98–9, 107, 152, 185 Bonnaffé, Jacques 66, 85, 112

252

INDEX

Bonnefoy, Yves ix, 40, 44, 51, 75, 88, 93–8, 99, 101–2, 178–84 Boulez, Pierre 13, 67–9, 72, 83, 117, 129, 160, 162 Bourdil, Laurence 105 Brecht, Bertolt 2–3, 6, 8, 11–12, 15–18, 28–9, 39, 47, 55, 135, 188 Bregovic, Goran 149 Brook, Peter 44, 54, 67, 84, 188–9 Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria 84, 89, 194 Büchner, Georg 3–4, 12, 228 Calvario, Philippe 124, 138–9, 141, 169, 177, 194 Carpi, Fiorenzo 46–7, 76 Carrère, Céline 134 Cartoucherie de Vincennes 14, 188–9 Casarès, Maria 77, 120, 158 Chahine, Youssef 85 Chase, James Hadley 37, 58–9, 144 Chateaubriand, René de 77, 147, 154 Chekhov, Anton 84, 89–90, 121, 123, 125, 127–9, 188 Chéreau, Patrice childhood, education, parents x–xii, 1–5, 45, 95, 101–3, 117, 155–6, 162, 193, 205 films Ceux qui m’aiment prendront le train 155–6 Gabrielle 155–6, 191, 194

Hôtel de France 83–4, 126, 144, 146 Intimacy 141, 156–8, 159, 168 Judith Therpauve 144 La Chair de l’orchidée 37, 58–9, 144 La Reine Margot 48–50, 79, 144, 145–54, 155 Le Compagnon 143–4 L’Homme blessé 116–17, 144 management Nanterre Amandiers 13–15, 37, 45, 79–84, 87–90, 107, 115, 117, 125–6, 131, 143, 170, 191 Piccolo Teatro, Milan 10–13, 16, 19–20, 28–9, 45–6, 83 Sartrouville 5–10, 12–14, 17–18, 22, 63, 80, 125 TNP Villeurbanne 10, 13–14, 19–20, 28, 46, 50–4, 67, 75, 79–80, 189 operas De la maison des morts 76, 150, 165–7 Der Ring des Nibelungen x, 2, 13, 21, 61, 66–74, 146, 175 Elektra 79, 103, 138, 155, 160, 173–6, 178 Les Contes d’Hoffmann 61, 64 L’Italiana in Algeri 12 Lucio Silla 115–16 Lulu 13, 66, 113, 160

INDEX

Tristan und Isolde 173, 191 Wozzeck 15 plays Combat de nègre et de chiens 15, 108, 117, 121–2 comedies 129–33, 168 Comme il vous plaira 66, 130–3, 168, 176–85 Dans la solitude des champs de coton 82, 88–90, 92, 123–4, 133, 168, 170, 191 Dom Juan 7, 12, 168 Fuenteovejuna 16 Hamlet ix, 2, 21, 37, 44, 51, 71, 75, 78–9, 84, 87–112, 116, 122, 127, 129, 133, 138–9, 143–4, 146, 160, 165, 169, 173–5, 182, 187–8, 190–2, 194 Henry VI/Richard III (Fragments) 21, 33, 124, 133–42, 168, 170 I Am the Wind 124, 158–60, 178 L’Affaire de la rue Lourcine 3, 5 L’Héritier de village 17, 30 L’intervention 16–17 La Dispute 12, 21, 37, 60, 61–6, 72, 80, 115–16, 121, 158, 177–8 La Fausse Suivante 12, 105–6, 115 La Nuit juste avant les forêts 160–1

253

Lear 4, 20, 21, 30, 53–60, 71–2 Le Massacre à Paris x, 19, 21, 45–53, 55, 73, 79, 100, 145–6 Le Prix de la révolte au marché noir ix, 18, 22–7, 31, 33–5, 37, 49, 136 Le Procès de Prague 15–16, 170 Les Paravents 3, 15, 21, 82, 117–20, 188 Les Soldats 3, 4, 10, 17, 73, 116 Le Retour au désert 88, 91, 120–4 Loin d’Hagondange 61, 74 Lulu 12–13, 19, 45, 61 Peer Gynt 37, 61, 74–9, 89, 105, 117, 121 Phèdre 103, 107, 124, 134, 138, 168–72, 189–90 Platonov 83–4, 89, 126 Quai Ouest 82, 88, 122–3 Quartett 25, 37, 115–17 Rêve d’automne xi, 37, 84, 124, 155, 160, 162–3, 191 Richard II ix, xi, 12, 21, 27, 28–45, 72–3, 87, 94–5, 127, 146, 185, 188–9, 191 Splendore e morte di Joaquin Murieta 12–13, 18–19, 56 Toller 12, 19–20, 46–7, 50, 59, 85, 127

254

INDEX

political agenda 4–5, 6–10, 14–18, 20, 24–5, 29, 34–6, 39, 48, 50, 52, 55–60, 69–71, 73, 80, 103–4, 113–15, 118–20, 190 readings, performances 124, 165, 167–8, 235 n. 6 teaching, seminars 125–42, 160–1 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre 1, 12, 115 Citti, Marc 89, 107, 127 Claudel, Paul 69, 78, 88, 188 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 14, 79 Comédie-Française 4, 13, 91, 124, 133, 153, 171–2, 189, 190, 192–4 Conrad, Joseph 121, 155–6, 191, 194 Conservatoire 27, 33, 124, 133–42 Copeau, Jacques 10–11, 188 Cortese, Valentina 18, 45, 62 costumes 13, 22, 33–4, 59, 69–70, 73, 75, 78, 89, 99, 110, 129, 130–1, 152, 166, 179–80, 184, 187 Courbet, Gustave 162, 235 n. 7 Coutant, Philippe 80, 237 n. 5 Crombecque, Alain 17, 80, 87–8 Cunningham, Merce 160 Curtis, Anthony 94 Damiani, Luciano 11 Delannoy, Daniel 100, 139, 143 Deloffre, Frédéric 63, 65 Denicourt, Marianne 89, 109–10

Déprats, Jean-Michel 41, 66, 93–4, 98, 102, 109, 134 Desarthe, Gérard 28, 38–9, 45, 59–60, 74–7, 87, 89, 92, 93, 96, 98, 101, 103–5, 108–10, 168, 177, 182, 188 Despléchin, Arnaud 66, 194 Dimitriádis, Dimitrís 18, 22–3, 26 Diot, André 14, 35, 100 Doillon, Jacques 83, 128 Dorst, Tankred 12, 19–20 Dort, Bernard 2, 7, 16, 29–30, 37, 41, 65, 82, 92 Dostoevsky, Fiodor 76, 124, 150, 165–7 Duchaussoy, Michel 171 Dumas, Alexandre 49, 145–8, 150–1 Dumur, Guy 41, 44, 51, 56 Duras, Marguerite 6, 124, 155, 188, 191 Ecole des Amandiers 81, 83–5, 88, 89, 110, 122, 125–33, 177 Eisenstein, Serguei 5, 146 Elizabethan theatre ix, 16, 21, 28–31, 40, 46, 55–6, 78, 118–19, 127–8, 137, 145, 147–48, 180 Emilfork, Daniel 37–8, 51, 89, 127–8 ensemble 7, 28, 58, 87, 111–12, 136, 140, 165–6, 170, 173, 191 Euripides 169, 171 Faulkner, William 76, 121

INDEX

film xii, 4, 5, 52, 81, 83–5, 92, 108, 110, 121, 125, 139, 143–58, 191, 194 forest 61–4, 66, 72, 130, 148, 158, 176–8, 181–2 Fosse, Jon 37, 84, 124, 155, 158–60, 162–3, 178, 191 Foucault, Michel 16, 116 Fox, Kerry 156–7 Freud, Sigmund 101, 103, 105, 174, 188, 244 n. 23 Gaîté Lyrique 62 Gance, Abel 33 Garcia-Valdès, Ariel 87, 136 Gautier, Jean-Jacques 39–41 Gayot, Joëlle 229 n. 79, 230 n. 2, 246 n. 17 Genet, Jean 3, 15, 21, 82, 115, 117–20 Géricault, Théodore 149, 162, 193 Gignoux, Hubert 16, 121 Glucksmann, André 56–7, 59–60 Godard, Colette 52, 167 Goldin, Nan 156, 160–1 Goldoni, Carlo 2, 128 Goya, Francisco xi, 78, 149, 193 Grassi, Paolo 10–12, 19, 45–6, 50 Greggory, Pascal 84–5, 89, 107–8, 124, 147, 171 Grinberg, Anouk 152 Grüber, Klaus Michaël 2, 80, 83, 109 Guibert, Hervé 3, 66, 82, 116–17, 124, 143–4 Guyotat, Pierre 116, 124, 161–2

255

Handel, Georg Friedrich 27, 139–40 Havel, Vaclav 15–16 Héliot, Armelle 131 Herlitzius, Evelyn 176 Hernandez, Brigitte 167 Hervieu-Léger, Clément 173, 191, 194, 195 Hesme, Clotilde 168, 177, 183 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 3, 78, 173–5 Hugo, Victor 4, 15–16, 106 Huguet, Vincent 177–9, 184–5 Huguet, Jérôme 140–1 Huppert, Isabelle 156, 194 Ibsen, Henryk 3, 61, 74–9 IMEC 17, 22, 105, 132, 193 Janácˇek, Leoš 66, 150, 155, 165–7 Jaoui, Agnès 84–5, 89, 128 Jarniou, Solenn 132–3 Jeuland, Yves 116 Jeune Théâtre National 185 Jones, Gwyneth 67–9, 72, 173 Jourdheuil, Jean 112, 128 Jouvet, Louis 114, 125, 214 n. 31 Kazan, Elia 4–5, 144 Keller, Marthe 109–10 Keltoum 120 Kleist, Heinrich von x, 128, 215 n. 52 Koltès, Bernard-Marie 3–4, 14–15, 66, 79, 82, 88–93, 108, 115–17, 120–4, 125, 133, 143, 156, 160–1, 167, 168, 170, 191

256

INDEX

Kott, Jan 30–1, 32, 185, 187–8 Kozintsev, Grigori 110 Krupp, Friedrich Albert 60, 70 Kureishi, Hanif 156–8 Kurosawa, Akira 136 La Place, Pierre-Antoine de 64 Labiche, Eugène 2–3, 5–6, 17, 166 Lacan, Jacques 88, 101–2, 221 n. 77, 225 n. 18 Lambrakis, Grigóris 24, 217 n. 9 Lan, David 66, 158–9 Lang, Fritz 4 Lang, Jack 80 Large, Brian 68 Laskey, Jack 159 Lavaudant, Georges 87, 134, 136, 189 Lavignac, André 67–8 Le Roux, Monique 66, 238 n. 19, 242 n. 64 Lenz, Jakob x, 3–4, 9, 16, 73, 116 Leviné, Eugen 20 Leyris, Pierre 34, 40–1, 44–5, 51, 94–6, 130, 134 Libolt, Alain 51, 65, 72–3, 85, 107–8 lighting 11, 14, 16, 26, 35, 47, 59, 75, 81, 85, 99–100, 123, 124, 129, 131, 139, 141, 147, 152–3, 156, 173, 175, 181 Linklater, Alexander 157 Living Theater 26, 188 Llorca, Denis 189 Loayza, Daniel 134–5, 138, 140–1

London 66, 141, 157–8, 159, 178 Lope de Vega, Félix 16–17, 49 Louxor 118 Louvre ix-xii, 84, 101, 116, 124, 145, 158–62 Loyrette, Henri 160–2 Lycée Louis-le-Grand 1–6, 16–17, 22, 37 Machiavelli, Niccolo 31, 33–4, 134–5 machinery xii, 7, 21, 28, 33–4, 36, 40, 59–60, 68, 72, 75–6, 99–100, 104 Maillan, Jacqueline 123 Malraux, André 118 Mann, Heinrich 146–7 Mann, Klaus 114 Mann, Thomas 193 Manufacture des Œillets 124, 133, 170, 244 n. 16 Maréchal, Marcel 50, 206 Marienstras, Richard 30–1 Marivaux, Pierre de 4, 6, 12–13, 17, 20, 57, 60, 61–6, 72, 80, 85, 106, 115–16, 121–2, 158, 177–8 Marlowe, Christopher x, 19, 21, 45–3, 65, 73, 79, 100, 145–7 Marquais, Michelle 25, 37, 115 Marxism 7, 57, 69 Mayer, Hans 71 Mazura, Franz 175 McIntyre, Donald 72, 175 McKellen, Ian 136, 139 Meier, Waltraud xi, 160, 173, 176

INDEX

Memling, Hans 33 Merleau-Ponty, Marianne 81 Mesguich, Daniel 128, 153, 189 Mesguich, Sarah 140–1, 153 Metge, Stéphane 135–6, 141–2, 160 Metropolitan Opera 166 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 2, 36 Mnouchkine, Ariane 14–15, 50, 82, 114, 188, 215 n. 45 Molière 7, 12, 44–5, 80, 168, 181–2, 187–8, 190, 194 Moscow 103–4, 143 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 62, 115–16 Müller, André 31–3, 113–15, 116, 146 Müller, Heiner 25, 82, 87, 115–17, 191 Music, Zoran 149 music and sound xi, 26–7, 38, 46–7, 50–1, 62, 67–9, 72, 75–6, 81, 83, 101, 106, 111, 127–8, 131, 136, 139, 149, 151, 166, 173, 175–6, 178 Nanterre Amandiers 13–14, 37, 45, 80–4, 87–90, 106–7, 115–17, 121, 126–8, 131, 141, 143, 152, 155, 170, 177, 191, 194 National Theatre 158 New York 121, 150–1, 155, 166 Neruda, Pablo 12–13, 18–19, 56 Nijinski, Vaslav 165, 191 Novarina, Valère 83

257

Nussac, Sylvie de 67–9, 77–8, 83, 175, 226 n. 31 O’Neill Theater Center 128 Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe 3, 14, 15, 20, 30, 39, 54, 58, 94, 116, 118, 124, 134, 167–8, 170, 177, 179, 189, 194, 195 Offenbach, Jacques 61, 64 Ogier, Bulle 81, 88, 162 Olivier, Laurence 28 opera 12–13, 19, 60, 61, 66–74, 106, 115, 117, 150, 155, 160, 162, 165–7, 173–6, 191 Opéra Bastille 15, 64, 194 Pacino, Al 135, 154–5 painting ix–xx, 3, 11, 16, 33, 36, 47, 59, 73, 75, 84, 100–1, 106, 110, 135, 148–9, 151, 160–2, 193–4, 211 n. 2, 235 n. 7 Paris, Jean 59–61 Peduzzi, Richard xi, 7, 11, 14, 35, 46, 59–60, 64, 68, 72–3, 76, 78, 89, 98–100, 110, 118–19, 121, 124, 126, 131, 152, 160, 162, 170, 177–8, 187–8 Perez, Vincent 89, 107, 153, 194 Piccoli, Michel 88, 106, 153 Piccolo Teatro 10–12, 16, 19–20, 28–30, 45–6, 50 Pieczonka, Adrianne 176 Planchon, Roger x, 3, 10–11, 12–14, 16–17, 19, 28,

258

INDEX

30–2, 40–1, 45, 49, 80, 135–6, 188 Podalydès, Denis 190–1 Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand 25–7, 52–3 Prince 101, 139 Quester, Hugues 37 Rabin, Staton 154 Rabourdin, Olivier 89, 106, 130, 132–3, 177 Racine, Jean 134, 168–72, 188, 189–90 Ramelli, Agostino 34, 36 Rand, Ayn 191–2 Reich, Wilhelm 77, 78 Regnault, François 62, 65, 69–70, 75–8, 88–90, 102, 119–20, 123, 171–2 Renucci, Robin 108–10 Resnais, Alain 6, 46, 128 Rétoré, Catherine 77 Rimbaud, Arthur 3, 90, 123, 168 Romans, Pierre 80–1, 89, 125–9, 143 Ronconi, Luca 83, 188–9 Rousselot, Philippe 147, 152 Ruf, Eric 112, 171–2, 190, 194 Rylance, Mark 156–9 Sade, Donatien, Marquis de 12, 64 Salonen, Esa Pekka 166–7, 173 Sandier, Gilles 30, 39, 56 Sandre, Didier 77, 105–6, 119–20, 128 Sarajevo 149–50

Sartre, Jean-Paul 13, 55, 78, 117, 188 scenography xi, 7, 11, 21, 28, 35–7, 46–7, 59–60, 62–3, 66, 68, 72–3, 75–6, 99–101, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 123, 152, 160, 162, 170, 175, 177–8, 187–8, 192–3 Schaubühne 91, 109, 123, 152, 189 Schmidt, Jacques 1, 14, 35 Sellier, Geneviève 145–6 Seneca 146, 169, 171 Serré, André 14, 35, 63 Shakespeare, William xi, 2–3, 20, 22–7, 29–31, 35, 41, 87–8, 92–3, 95, 97, 121, 127, 137, 139, 145, 147, 157, 158–9, 169, 187–92 Antony and Cleopatra 19, 180, 215 n. 60 As You Like It 66, 130–3, 168, 176–85, 189 Coriolanus 24, 192 Hamlet see Chéreau, Hamlet Henry IV 19, 28, 31–2, 188 Henry V 28, 33, 192 Henry VI 24, 27, 30, 33, 133–40, 189, 192 Julius Caesar 23–5, 151–2, 191 King Lear 30, 41, 53–5, 61, 71–3, 100, 111, 154, 155, 187, 188, 189 Love’s Labour’s Lost see Chéreau, comedies Macbeth 5, 72, 136, 158–9, 176

INDEX

Measure for Measure 189 The Merchant of Venice 189 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 63–4, 97, 163, 188, 189 Much Ado About Nothing see Chéreau, comedies Othello 41, 66, 180 Richard II see Chéreau, Richard II Richard III xii, 24, 30, 87, 97, 134–7, 140, 154, 189, 192 Romeo and Juliet 1, 190 Sonnets 3, 24, 116, 168, 181 The Tempest 63, 189 Titus Andronicus 24, 98, 189 Twelfth Night see Chéreau, comedies The Winter’s Tale 81, 88–9, 90–3, 98–9, 107, 113, 127 Shaw, George Bernard 69–71, 78 Simon, François 59–60 Sobel, Bernard 6, 75, 83, 212 n. 14 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 51–2 Stanislavsky, Constantin 123, 125, 127 Starobinski, Jean 2, 4, 147, 181–2 Stein, Peter 2–3, 67, 74–6, 80, 83, 103, 106, 123, 180–1, 189, 212 n. 5 Stendhal 56–7, 189 Strancar, Nada 77, 89, 106, 108, 110 Stratz, Claude 45, 64, 80, 83, 85, 88, 119, 152 Strauss, Botho 124, 152, 195

259

Strauss, Richard 114, 173–4 Stravinsky, Igor 160, 165 Strehler, Giorgio 11–12, 14–16, 28, 30, 44–5, 74, 84, 133, 189 Strindberg, August 12, 194 subsidized theatre 7, 10–14, 39, 51–2, 80, 82, 118, 167 Supervielle, Jules 40, 131, 178–81 Tasca, Catherine 80–1, 117 Téchiné, André 83, 128 Théâtre National Populaire x, 6, 13, 19–20, 46, 52, 54, 67, 79, 87 Théâtre de la Ville 75, 162 Thieû Niang, Thierry 124, 161–2, 165, 167, 191 Thompson, Danièle 50, 145–51 Todeschini, Bruno 89, 194 Toller, Ernst 19–20 translation x, 2, 4, 19, 34, 40–1, 44–5, 48, 50–1, 64, 75–6, 83, 88, 93–8, 121, 123, 130–1, 134, 152, 158, 168, 178–80, 182–4, 231 n. 16, 245 n. 27 Tréhot, Lise x, 193, 211 n. 2 Treilhou-Balaudé, Catherine 44, 99, 127 Trier, Lars von 156 Valéry, Paul 103 Valli, Allida 45, 49 van Hove, Ivo 66, 112, 190–3 Vauthier, Jean 47–51 Verne, Jules 73

260

INDEX

Vézinet-Crombecque, Christine 128, 130 Vilar, Jean 3–4, 6, 10, 12–14, 29, 37, 52–3, 87–8, 99, 158, 187–8 Vinaver, Michel 152 Vincent, Hélène 17, 116 Vincent, Jean-Pierre 1–2, 6, 14, 16–17, 27, 30, 41, 83, 112, 116, 143 Visconti, Luchino 4–5, 7, 33, 144, 191–2 Vitez, Antoine 84, 88–9, 103, 106, 108, 123, 128, 161, 188 Vuarnet, Jean-Noël 51 Wagner, Richard 2, 37, 61, 66–74, 76, 147, 159, 160, 173

Wagner, Winifred 68 Wagner, Wolfgang 67 Wajda, Andrezj 12, 214 Wedekind, Frank 12–13, 19, 45, 128 Welles, Orson 3–5, 30, 144, 191 Wenzel, Jean-Paul 61, 74 Wilson, Georges 13 Wilson, John Dover 2, 78, 92, 97, 107, 146, 169, 232–3 n. 51 Wilson, Robert 51, 83, 87, 116, 191 Yordanoff, Wladimir 108 Young Vic 158–9 Zweig, Stefan 193