Avignon Festival – Avignon Festival: The English language wins its offensive

This year, the English language is “invited” to the Avignon Festival, which attracts many international visitors to the city’s stages. So in the chilly intimacy of a white penitential church, we meet Tim Crouch and his British comedy.

“Truth is a dog’s must for a puppy.”

In “Truth is a dog’s must for a puppy”, The writer, actor and director uses all his stagecraft in a single arena to talk about the drama and the relationship he makes (or doesn’t) with the audience. Equipped with a virtual reality headset, he takes us deep into the heart of Shakespeare’s King Lear, questioning the nature of the fool and his exit from the play. A very British sense of provocation, with a touch of punk at heart, Tim Crouch addresses the audience without insistence, conjuring up gastric reflux for one, painting a portrait of an opportunist for another, imagining the price paid by all to conform to a hierarchy. In any performance hall. Above all, he separates the springs, the mechanisms of this relationship, which usually forces men to lock themselves together in a dark room that accepts theatrical convention. We laugh a lot without stopping ourselves from thinking about the fragility of live performance.

“all of them”

Another environment than that provided by the Royal Court Theater”All of them“, composed of three monologues by Alistair McDowall, worked by the disturbing Kate O’Flynn. Armed with difficult texts, in an oppressive environment, the female characters reveal three existences that portray a normal life with an awareness of the precarious balance of everything. What surrounds them.

The last text is very convincing. If serious attention is required from the actress with the delivery of the machine gun, it represents the constant whirlwind of life: childhood with lots of conversations, adolescence learning about sex without barriers and many details, entering adulthood, marriage, death of parents, birth, death of a brother, guilt, divorce.. .everything rings so true and so deeply moving that we project ourselves deliciously into it.

“Truth is a dog kennel” and “All” in Avignon until July 23. 04 90 14 14 14, festival-avignon.com