With just a few days in Provence we are scheduled to see only two productions at the most enduring theatre festival of them all, the Festival d’Avignon. Since 1946, for nearly a month each July, the town is riotously surrendered to theatre. You can see productions not only in traditional theatres but also in schools, gardens, cloisters, chapels, churches, museums, even the Papal Palace and, most famously, on the streets, where every 50 feet you stumble upon a juggling act, an a capella chorus of schoolgirls or a costumed medieval procession trying to stir up evening business for an Anouilh play performing in the “Off” festival. The official, high-culture festival has invited 33 events this year, while the self-invited Festival Off has swelled to nearly 500 productions.
We pull into Avignon in time to grab a bite and head for the 10 p.m. performance of an intriguing first, a French adaptation of the 19th-century poet Johann Hölderlin’s famous German translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, titled Oedipe le tyran. The production will be performed in the courtyard of the Papal Palace. Two days later we’ll view another classic text translated into Italian, the Giulio Cesare of Shakespeare—or so we thought.
But it is Sunday, July 12, and no one is thinking about the theatre—all minds are on the World Cup. The final game begins at 8:30. By 10:30 Brazil is shut out. By 11 centre ville is really heating up. Thousands of French are marching down the rue de la République, eight, ten abreast, faces glowing with elation as well as broad stripes of greasepaint in the red, white and blue of the French flag. Dogs have been painted in similar stripes for the night, the motorcycles are in costume, babies are out and their carriages are flying banners.
Crowds streaming north and south converge in front of a McDonald’s across from a Häagen Dazs beneath the second-story windows of the Liverpool Pub, where triumphal youths dancing on the window ledges sweep the French flag in figure eights. In a rain of confetti, a conga line whose leaders hold burning tapers snakes around the street. Shimmying up a lightpost slathered with theatre posters, an intense jeune homme with a bullhorn starts the Marseillaise. For mass joy, there has been nothing like this since V.E. Day! Oh, did I mention that the 10 p.m. Oedipus performance was cancelled so the audience could see the game? To whomever happened to hear about the change, they performed that night at seven. Pas de problème—I saw both shows a couple of nights later.
The Oedipe had its incidental strengths—the one-man chorus of Jean-Marc Bory and the superb Jocasta of Christine Gagnieux, both in the restrained, high rhetorical tradition of French classic theatre—but these did not outweigh numerous perversities, including the underlying project of translating a the world-famous translation into merely serviceable language in a third tongue. The translator and dramaturg, the redoubtable French literary theorist Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who is among other things a German literature scholar, insists that Hölderlin’s “version” of Sophocles shows Oedipus to be not just rex, but an ugly and hysterical tyrannus, a tyrant in our modern sense (in the Greek sense the word points more to the irregular manner in which power is acquired rather than to its exercise), perhaps foreshadowing Hölderlin’s mental breakdown two years later. This dubious choice led director Jean-Louis Martinelli of the Strasbourg State Theatre to another, the costuming of Oedipus in the high boots and long, royal coat with the flared cuffs and collar of the ancien regime, a costume in which Creon appears attired—a heavy-handed irony—as he takes over the exhausted city of Thebes in the final scene.
The Chorus was reduced to a single figure, less like the worried, pious, implicated citizens we know from Sophocles than the narrator of Our Town, from another time, with no stake in the action. Despite this reduction, the director managed to swell the cast to 15, with various child extras impressed into service to lead the blind. Of course the cast size could have been an attempt to fill the playing platform erected across the entire 80-foot length of the massive palace wall that frames a side of the open courtyard. To work a stage that size, one longed for masks, robes, cothurni.
All this might have been tolerated with a tolerable actor in the role of Oedipus, played here by Charles Berling, an increasingly well-known French stage and screen actor given to roles of ambiguous sexuality. Short of stature, with an inexpressive face and a thin, reedy voice that expelled lines in mechanical, jerky rhythms, Berling played the “tyrant” Oedipus as petulant boy. The entire production appeared in some sense over-interpreted—everything derived from Lacoue-Labarthe’s monothematic reading of Hölderlin, over-interpreted but under-experienced. It left me cold. But not as cold as the Giulio Cesare that came to Avignon from Cesena, Italy. It was so cold it burnt.
This Giulio Cesare—not an Italian translation of Shakespeare’s play, but “after” Shakespeare—was a performance project undertaken by the experimental Societas Raffaello Sanzio based in Cesena, near Bologna. The Society, now a leading center of theatrical experiment in Italy, was founded in 1981 by Bologna art-school graduates Romeo Castellucci and his sister Claudia among others, and has an identity split between its conceptual designers and non-professional actors. Named for the high Renaissance painter Raphael, it has in recent years garnered some important prizes, including, for this current production, the 1997 UBU Prize as the best Italian production of the year.
The Raphaelites went fishing in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and came up with a few big ones—intellectual, metaphysical and visual themes on which their performance piece was built. Their first discovery: the play was about Rhetoric. Hence in the first of two parts, the dominant images and choices were principally concerned with speech, rather than speeches. The piece opened with a full-screen projected sequence produced by an actor’s placing an endoscope down one nostril to show a larynx opening and closing in the act of speaking, like a bloody and bizarre sexual organ. Other speech explorations of Part One included the introduction of an obese actor dressed as a Sumo wrestler, hardly able to walk, and splayed like a beached whale on a cart, uttering the words of Cicero, whose mention in Shakespeare as a Roman Senator was one of the clues that led Castellucci to his chosen theme.
Of the three central figures of Part One, Brutus, Caesar and Marc Antony, two were defined by the rhetorical experiment: Brutus’s lines were spoken by an actor who periodically gulped helium from a tube connected to a canister, resulting in sudden bursts of high-pitched speech, a sort of canned Donald Duck. By contrast, Marc Antony’s funeral oration, or part of it, was spoken by a performer who had suffered a tracheotomy, but who had found a novel way to produce a muffled, strangely alienated speech without the use of a voice amplifying device.
Looking perhaps for a vein of passion to elevate what was looking like a P.T. Barnum clinic, Castellucci turned to the Passion, converting Julius Caesar into Jesus Christ. (Same initials, he points out in the program.) This Caesar has no element of the tyrant. He is played as a fragile old man, a sacrificial figure wrapped in a bloody red swatch of cape. In preparation for martyrdom, his bare feet are washed by a Magdalen-like female devotee. Standing, he sheds his cape, exposing his shrivelled, defenseless body to full view.
In his voluminous, highly intellectual—if not didactic—notes to the production book, Castellucci writes of this moment: “Caesar’s killing introduces a moment of great pity. All appears soft. The apex of violence is here transfigured into something which is impalpably fragile and delicate.” Yet several pages on he calls Caesar’s full-daylight murder the
“snuff movie of the polis.” Indeed, the image of the vulnerable body, presented like a coat on a hanger, is more like pornography than tragedy. Like the surrounding displays of the obese, tracheotomized and helium-drugged performers, this “moment of great pity” is more likely to be experienced as an aggression.
The setting of Part One consisted of a few spare elements, such as piled cinder blocks, arranged to suggest the remains of the classical world, bathed in a brilliant white light. Part Two’s design, by far the most impressive element of the entire mise-en-scène, summoned up an apocalyptic, post-Holocaust universe.
Through almost total darkness, one makes out a terrible devastation of hanging wires and destroyed masonry. An enormous battering ram descends from the flies and smashes into the stage floor. Again. Again. As one’s eyes adjust one can see in a spectral light the back wall of the stage gapingly exposed, and a tumble of metal chair frames in the foreground. Theatre itself is the metaphor for depicting this end of civilization.
Out of this destroyed world emerge two feeble, anorexic figures—Caesar’s “lean and hungry” and “Give me fat men” were no doubt cue to this conceit. The first is Brutus, in this act played by an androgynous beanpole of a man, waving a cross-like sword and wearing a bra. The second is a very small woman in polyester chain mail: this is Cassius. The last actors in this theatre of apocalypse, they perform their roles extravagantly, but badly. Brutus is afraid to fall upon his sword, or in this case, shoot himself in the mouth, and has to be instructed by the earlier Brutus, who enters in a robe looking like the Christ victorious emerging from the tomb in a renaissance painting. The first Brutus efficiently has himself shot in the back of the head. But in the end, instead of taking the Roman exit, the second Brutus comes downstage and begs for applause.
While all this self-referential theatricality is proceeding, an unmistakable environment is being developed in the sound and light scores: grating, metallic music and sweeping searchlights are accompanied by barking dogs and anguished cries. Brutus appears in a rubber bath cap. Showers, anyone? I make no secret of it, Castellucci has by now lost my already ambivalent sympathies. An entire political outlook comes into view with these stage effects, and it is not pretty. Castellucci identifies himself with “my Artaud”—but does this Holocaust stuff really have the rigor of Artaud, or is it full of rotted sensation, like Apocalypse Now? It looks like another case of the kitschification of Auschwitz, what Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander talks about in Reflections of Nazism and Alvin Rosenfeld in Imagining Hitler. And Auschwitz and its manifold associations are not even Castellucci’s point: its imagery is grabbed here like some off-the-rack son et lumiére show.
The story being told appears to be one of a radical fall into apocalyptic ruination, an oft-told tale—but okay, one can argue that it is Shakespeare’s tale, too. As in Shakespeare, the tale unfolds in before-and-after fashion. Before and after the assassination of Caesar in Shakespeare, and with far grander pretension, before and after the sacrifice of Christ in Castellucci. I spent a while wondering whether the apocalyptic enfeeblement of the second part, if two such disparate concepts can be combined in a single stage image, should be read as a Nietzschean attack on the “femininity” of the Christian epoch and therefore as nostalgia for the lost brutality of the classical world; or as grief over Western civilization’s fall into godless destruction, and therefore as nostalgia for the lost purity of an ideal Christian moment. Either way, there’s a hankering after bombastic extremes and a pornographic specularity that make me wary in art as in politics.
“I feel the Roman pantomime as being much closer and more diffuse than the Greek tragedy,” writes Castellucci. Here’s how he does the Greeks: I read in a recent issue of Western European Stages that in his Oresteia, a mining of Aeschylus as Giulio Cesare is of Shakespeare, Castellucci had Agamemnon’s slain body represented in the form of a “freshly skinned and disemboweled carcass of a goat,” winched out of a coffin to hang above the stage, dripping blood.
Elinor Fuchs is visiting professor of dramaturgy at Yale School of Drama. Her most recent book is The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism (Indiana University Press).
