Organisers of the Avignon international festival that opens Thursday are hoping to rekindle the public's taste for theatre. With a range of live performances and events, the festival will try to reboot a sector that has suffered badly because of the Covid pandemic.
For the next three weeks, organisers are looking to woo a hesitant public back into theatres in the southern French city, counting on the reputation of one of the world’s leading festivals.
Director Olivier Py has set up more than 50 shows, hundreds of performances in the Off festival, along with other events, concerts, recitals and conferences.
The traditional festival parade is back after two years of absence.
With around 70 percent of tickets already sold, the director is keen to see the success of this 76th edition as he prepares to hand over the reins to Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues at the end of this season, after eight years at the helm.
One man who is glad to be back in Avignon is Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who will premiere his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s "The Black Monk" (Le Moine Noir) on Thursday evening at the Cour d’Honneur au Palais des Papes.
It will be Serebrennikov’s fourth appearance at the Avignon festival, after "The Idiots" (2015), "Dead Souls" (2016) and "Outside" (2019).
"It’s the best theatre festival in the world," he told French news agency AFP.
“‘Le Moine noir’ de Tchekhov me fait trembler et frissonner”
— Télérama (@Telerama) June 30, 2022
Longtemps assigné à résidence à Moscou, il vit à Berlin depuis la guerre en Ukraine. Fasciné par la folie, fou de travail, Kirill Serebrennikov monte Tchekhov à Avignon. #FDA22https://t.co/U4LtqE8NFF
Par @fabpascaud pic.twitter.com/gBH38cWM7B
Freedom is not dead
"There’s something extraordinary to have all these companies producing things at the same time in this city, it’s a feeling of liberty," said Serebrennikov, who has been living in in exile in Berlin since he left Russia after criticising its offensive in Ukraine.
He says Chekhov’s lesser-known play has always intrigued him since he was a child.
"I love to explore the unknown, just like I did with "Tchaikovsky’s Wife" (in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May and also screened in Avignon),” he told AFP.
"The Black Monk is an international project with Germans, Russians, Armenians, Latvians and Filipinos. It’s like the theatre of the world," he added, emphasising the power theatre has to bring people together.
Serebrennikov was rehearsing in Avignon last week when he learned of the sudden closure of the Gogol Centre in Moscow, which he directed from 2012 to February 2021, when he was forced to leave his post.
The Gogol Centre theatre, one of the last bastions of artistic freedom in Vladimir Putin's Russia, shut its doors last Thursday night with a defiant final show called "I Don't Take Part In War".
It will now function under new management and its old name - the Nikolai Gogol Drama Theatre.
Difficult future
Meanwhile, in France, theatre has been slow to pick up after the pandemic, and Avignon director Olivier Py has noted that festivals have become more successful than year-round theatre productions.
Because of support of French government aid packages during the Covid pandemic, theatres managed an 85 percent attendance rate in 2021, after a year of closures - still lower than the 95.5 percent attendance of 2019.
"Many of us thought that things would go back to normal, but that has not been the case at all. We’re down by 30 to 40 percent," Nathalie Szewczyk, head of administration for the Théâtre Rive Gauche in Paris told AFP.
"People have radically changed their habits," she said, citing health restrictions related to social distancing, mask wearing and vaccine passes over the past year.
New Covid infections may have an impact as early as this summer, keeping audiences away and posing a logistical headache to replace sick actors.
Szewczyk also pointed to inflation.
"Cafés can raise their prices and people will still buy coffee, but for culture, it just gets cast aside, and people say 'Oh let’s just watch Netflix," she said.
'Make us laugh'
Marc Lesage, director of three Paris theatres has the same concerns.
Inflation has pushed the cost of decors and accessories up by 20 percent at a time when municipal councils are scaling back on funding, putting companies on the back foot for the new season.
With the economic woes and the fallout from the pandemic, audiences are also looking for something lighthearted.
"People keep asking 'Have you got any shows that will make us laugh? We’re sick of war, we see it every day on television'," Szewczyk said."I understand where they’re coming from but it is a worry if we’re all competing to do the same thing."
"People want to laugh and they want something they can count on. The need to laugh is the great leveller, but it’s not easy to do comedies," Lesage says.
"We’ve come through this period well, but as soon as we try to do something experimental, then we’re walking on thin ice."
