The 2022 Avignon festival begins with shows featuring whirling monks, a karate nun and a kind of It’s a Knockout in papal socks. Outgoing festival director Olivier Py’s opening 10-hour production, My Exalted Youth, is a meta-theatre fable of a McJobbing Harlequin and his combative relationship with an older lover. The scabrous satire is sharply delivered as a kinky cardinal is tricked by Harlequin into dancing in the underwear of a nun “with a black belt in modern theology” in order to obtain a rare Rimbaud manuscript. But this is blunted by extended sermonising passages that crowd out the audience’s desire to think for itself. Py’s exalted, utopian theatre is – all too often – a sort of lecture hall. I left it after a few hours to see other work.
Similarly navel-gazing – and completing a directorial manspreading over the festival’s first three days – is Simon Falguières’ 13-hour long The Nest of Ashes (★★☆☆☆), which rehashes various fairytales including Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty with a sprinkling of Beckettian and Mnouchkineian stagecraft, and plenty of tally-ho idealisation of the life of a young theatre troupe. When it is tight – for about three hours of its vast length, in particular the last hour – it is seriously good, revealing a singular imagination. But offering such a huge frame to a 33-year-old director doesn’t help Falguières’ talent to develop. Crucial moments (so patiently anticipated!) such as the reawakening of the long-slumbering Queen, or the union of the two central lovers – one modern, one mythical – are sometimes botched and passed over too quickly, and the young troupe does not yet have the gravitas to hold a stage for such a long time.
