Avignon Festival Gets English Accents

Brexit will not go through Avignon. Immediately after his appointment as the director of the festival, Diego Rodríguez went to London, to the very chic district of Sloane Square, where the Royal Court Theater is located, to invite the English to Provence for its first edition. His visit took him to the office of 56-year-old Vicky Featherstone, where he looked at the words of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond or Sarah Kane.

The Royal Court is a British institution: a publishing house, a theater and a bastion of avant-garde theater. Here, since 1956, teachers have been exploring the possibilities of drama. Their turn? Stimulating stage and play with texts that distort language to better hear the world. “Our mission remains the same. We find the voices of tomorrow and give them a platform to express themselves. ensures Vicky Featherstone. His team receives 3,000 pieces a year and keeps only a handful. This year, they chose only one writer, Alistair McDowall, to respond to Diego Rodriguez’s demands: “Amazed that there was no connection between us and the festival, Thiago told me about his fascination with the diversity of English and the fact that it is spoken everywhere, even if it is sometimes a colonial language, imposed. Art Director’s Memoir.

The call of Avignon’s new boss was both political and aesthetic. He announced that every year, a foreign language would be honored in the city of Popes. By choosing English to open the ball, inviting actor, screenwriter and director Tim Crouch and Tim Etchells, founder of Forced Entertainment, he sets the tone: there’s no question of self-inflicted withdrawal. Through Brexit. There is no longer any question of leaving the richness of syntax derived from Shakespeare in the hands of a simplistic globalization. But by taking on the Royal Court, the festival’s director – also a playwright – goes further. It invites extremism. It encourages the arrival of poets. Uncompromising with the search for new forms, he names with feathers the boldness that throws lexical and grammatical logic over its head.

Be careful

At the age of 36, playwright Alistair McDowell is a prime example of an adventurer pushing theatrical representation to its limits. Ellipses, repetitions, time loops, confusing punctuation, complex structure of sentences, a tangle of lines on the page: his writing is a challenge to movement, and a friendly call to the actors’ attention. It is impossible for artists to rely on knowledge. They have to be in the present tense and have some kind of awareness of pronunciation, if they don’t want to betray a text score with growing rhythms.

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