Laura Cappelle

It’s not the only sign that Lepage and the French company Théâtre du Soleil, which is staging the play, have let the kerfuffle overwhelm them. “Kanata” was supposed to delve into the troubled relationship between Canada’s Indigenous people and their colonizers. The final product does explore the plight of the country’s First Nations, but it does so through the defensive gaze of a white artist who can’t resist telling us that he, too, has been victimized.

Lepage has been plagued by accusations of cultural insensitivity this year. Performances of his production “SLAV,” inspired by African-American slave songs, were halted in Montreal after an outcry because it featured a predominantly white cast. Then came “Kanata” and an open letter from Indigenous artists and activists, published in the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir in July. In it, the authors accused Lepage and the Théâtre du Soleil of seeking to tell their stories without Indigenous input.

Shortly after, the production’s North American co-producers withdrew their financial support and it was called off. (Activists said that they never asked for that to happen, only for inclusion.) In September, however, Ariane Mnouchkine, founder and director of the Théâtre du Soleil, announced that the company would stage the production after all, as part of the Festival d’Automne, a yearly arts event in Paris. Mnouchkine used the opportunity to rail against what she called the “censorship” of the play in Canada.

There are sly references to the debate in the first scene of “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy,” but the first half of the production sets up promising characters. Lepage is fond of telling stories through shifting perspectives and mixed media, and he weaves together a series of loosely related subplots. Most of them center on Hastings Street in Vancouver, in British Columbia, where a character of Mohawk descent, Tanya, prostitutes herself to finance a heroin addiction. She is estranged from her mother, Leyla, who works in a museum. Tanya befriends Miranda, a French painter, while a serial killer, based on real-life murderer Robert W. Pickton, lurks in the background.

The characters allow Lepage to touch on several issues that have affected Canada’s Indigenous people: the large number of missing and murdered Indigenous women; the prevalence of substance abuse; and the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their communities, a practice that continued until the 1980s. The production isn’t especially subtle in addressing those issues, however. The murderer is a brooding caricature, and the scene in which he kills Tanya in his van is both predictable and over the top, with bloodcurdling screams and blood splattered on the window.

Until that point, “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy” is merely a passable play, with practically none of Lepage’s usual inventiveness. The transitions are clunky, with multiple set changes, all handled in full view by the Théâtre du Soleil’s large troupe. The dialogue has little flow to it, and the acting often felt artificial on opening night. (Mnouchkine came out for a preshow speech, in which she asked the audience to think of it as “a final rehearsal” for the cast.)

After Tanya’s death, however, Lepage tacks on overt meta-references to the “Kanata” uproar that divert attention from the Indigenous storylines. Miranda decides to paint the murdered women and to exhibit her work at a local community center. At the last minute, managers realize Miranda hasn’t asked the families of the victims for permission and — wait for it — they cancel the exhibition.

“Our history has been stolen from us for 400 years,” one Indigenous character says. “Expect some strong reactions.” One can hear Lepage reply through Miranda: “I’m an artist! These women moved me as human beings, not Indigenous people.”

At one point, the painter laments: “Nowadays, to understand a black person, you have to be black! To understand a Jewish person, you have to be Jewish!”

The line echoed Mnouchkine’s own words in an interview with Le Devoir: “If we start saying ‘We Jews’ or ‘We blacks’ because of our legitimate bitterness about the past, we will only reproduce the same crazy irreparable suffering.”

The French director’s stance isn’t unusual in her country, where the notion of cultural appropriation isn’t widely recognized. (Unsurprisingly, there were no protests at Saturday’s premiere.) It’s also in keeping with the universalist ethos of the Théâtre du Soleil, a utopian collective founded in 1964. It employs actors from diverse backgrounds, and its productions have often taken inspiration from foreign cultures.

The company’s brand of humanism was shaped at a time when oppressed minorities had few opportunities to make their voices heard, however. The times have changed, and it’s disheartening to see Lepage and Mnouchkine, both celebrated directors with an international following and significant power, dig their heels in and cry censorship instead of engaging with a community.

“Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy” ends with Miranda alone in her studio. As she starts to paint, she conjures up a ghostlike Tanya who is reunited at last with her mother. The tableau, well-meaning though it is, enshrines Miranda as a white savior who transcends divisions and a painful history through art. Remind you of anyone?

“Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy”

Through Feb. 17 at the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris; festival.automne.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/theater/robert-lepage-kanata-review.html" id="518c258f-828d-36fd-a905-e0d4980a6784">The New York Times</a>.

PARIS — Robert Lepage would like you to know that he doesn’t shy away from controversy. To make his point, the Canadian director renamed his latest project, “Kanata,” which was briefly canceled in July after an outcry about cultural appropriation, then revived, and, ultimately, had its world premiere in Paris on Saturday. Now it’s called “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy,” and runs through Feb. 17.

Review: In Robert Lepage's 'Kanata,' the Director, Too, Plays the Victim

The production is a timely reminder that for a fraction of the cost of big-budget TV and movies, theater can still hold its own when it comes to larger-than-life sagas. Van Hove’s operatic, mud-soaked “Electre/Oreste” finds psychological truth in Euripides’ classical tragedies — with the help of a little choreography in lieu of CGI.

The tireless director has combined the two plays into one uninterrupted staging, a strategy he has used in the past: His “Roman Tragedies” (2007) and “Kings of War” (2015) each stitched together several Shakespeare plays. Euripides’ “Orestes” picks up five years after the conclusion of “Electra,” but it’s as if no time has passed. After Electra and Orestes conspire to kill their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover in the first play, the siblings face justice and spiral into further violence in the second.

None of the elements that make up van Hove’s production are especially original on their own. A quartet of percussionists is in the background throughout and creates an ominous soundscape for the action, in a manner reminiscent of classical Japanese theater. (This is acknowledged in the playbill.) The thick layer of mud onstage, meanwhile, brings to mind Pina Bausch’s earthy “Rite of Spring,” and the comparison doesn’t stop there. The action is interspersed with ritualistic dance scenes led by Electra and the Chorus, who beat their chests and fall repeatedly into the mud. While the choreography was created by Wim Vandekeybus, it is indebted to the raw, primal spasms that drove Bausch’s dancers to exhaustion.

Yet van Hove knows exactly how to measure his ingredients, and he draws maximum tension out of the interplay of dance, music and text.“Electre/Oreste,” which will be shown live in cinemas worldwide on May 23, is aesthetically very different from the director’s first production for the Comédie-Française in 2016, a video-heavy adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s film “The Damned.” Still, both productions lay bare the brutality of intergenerational tragedies, and the subtle ways in which violence begets violence over time.

A number of Comédie-Française actors from “The Damned” return in “Electre/Oreste,” starting with the idiosyncratic Christophe Montenez, by turns rabid and vulnerable as Orestes. Elsa Lepoivre plays the two women murdered by the siblings, Clytemnestra in “Electra” and her sister, Helen, in “Orestes,” with beautiful attention to detail. When Clytemnestra visits Electra, who was married off to a poor peasant, her awkward stumble as she steps into the mud in a gown and heels speaks to the class differences Euripides examines in the play.

Those divisions are evident throughout. The noble characters’ royal blue costumes stand out against the brown and black color scheme, and quickly stain in the mud. Electra is highly conscious and ashamed of her social demotion, and yet, at times, embraces it as a form of liberation.

She is by far the most interesting character in the plays, with an inner resolve and appetite for violence that outstrip her guilt-stricken brother’s, and van Hove found the right actress in the underrated Suliane Brahim. With her cropped hair and tattered shorts, Brahim cuts an androgynous figure, who doesn’t just maim Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus, but bites into his dismembered genitals before throwing them at the Chorus.

Electra’s relationship with the members of the Chorus is one of the strengths of “Electre/Oreste.” As the peasants wash themselves from the same bucket as Brahim and join her in fervent dances, they seem like a surrogate family, joined in misery.

Van Hove has made some cuts to Euripides. He skips the divine apparition at the end of “Electra,” for instance, but maintains the deus ex machina that concludes “Orestes.” Apollo (Gaël Kalimindi) appears to restore the peace, and tells Orestes that he must marry Hermione, Helen’s daughter, whose throat he was just about to slit. (A few awkward laughs ensued.) But then, as the god disappears, in a final flash, we see Orestes about to stab Hermione regardless. In van Hove’s world, violence isn’t so easily stemmed.

British playwright Dennis Kelly thanks Euripides in the acknowledgments for “Girls and Boys,” staged by Mélanie Leray at the Théâtre du Petit Saint-Martin, and it’s not hard to see why. The family killings at the play’s heart reverse the story of Medea, the subject of another of the Greek tragedian’s plays. Here, it’s a father who takes revenge on his estranged wife by murdering their two children.

It’s a grim plot, and to Kelly’s credit, he builds up to the crime masterfully. “Girls and Boys” is a monologue told from the perspective of the unnamed mother, and it’s easy to miss the clues in the first half that horror awaits. While she tells us in the first sentence that she took an “instant dislike” to her future husband, her recollection of their first encounter, in Italy in the queue to board an easyJet flight, is delightfully funny. (My companion, who hadn’t read the playbill, thought she was in for a comedy about a marriage.)

“Girls and Boys” had its initial run in London and New York last year, starring Carey Mulligan. For the French premiere, Leray cast Constance Dollé, another experienced stage and film actress. Her performance has earned her a nomination at the Molières, France’s most prestigious theater awards, and it’s well deserved. She takes to the role with an irrepressible animation that eventually makes her understated pain near the end all the more striking.

Kelly doesn’t specify to whom or where the woman is telling her story, but here, she isn’t completely alone onstage: Every night, four volunteers from the audience sit around a set dinner table with her. They aren’t required to interact, but their presence enhances the text’s conversational feel. One recent night, the three women and one man at the table nodded and tutted at regular intervals as Dollé’s eyes darted among them.

Philippe Le Moine’s French translation of “Girls and Boys” captures the woman’s working-class background and pluckiness. She is a bright, self-aware narrator, stopping at times to relive memories with her absent children before adding matter-of-factly: “I mean it’s not like I think they’re actually here.” Dollé’s character may be struggling to make sense of her own story, but she won’t be victimized, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Directed by Ivo van Hove. Comédie-Française, through July 3.

Directed by Mélanie Leray. Théâtre du Petit Saint-Martin, through May 18.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5963901a-f9b3-46ad-85b4-f306f6d7d62e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/theater/ivo-van-hove-electre-oreste-comedie-franciase.html">The New York Times</a>.

Forget 'Game of Thrones.' No one does violence like Euripides

(Theater Review): PARIS — Long-separated siblings looking to avenge their father, an ancient dynasty under threat, savage murders and even a penis chopped off. No, this isn’t the final season of “Game of Thrones” but two plays written nearly 2,500 years ago: Euripides’ “Electra” and “Orestes,” newly staged at the Comédie-Française by Belgian director Ivo van Hove.

Take the Australian director Simon Stone. The playbill for his new work, “The Trilogy of Revenge” (“La Trilogie de la vengeance”), running at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris through April 21, informs the reader of Stone’s long-standing “interest in the feminine condition,” demonstrated by the fact that he has directed modern versions of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Euripides’ “Medea.” We learn that “The Trilogy of Revenge,” a contemporary tale of sexual misconduct and gory retaliation inspired by Elizabethan theater, is “a meditation on violence against women.”

The implication is clear: Here is a woke production, steeped in feminist values. But the devil is in the execution, and “The Trilogy of Revenge” is too awkwardly conceived to live up to the standards it sets itself.

Stone, who is just 34, has built a career out of rewriting classic plays and lending them a contemporary twist. For “The Trilogy of Revenge,” his starting point was a trio of English Renaissance works: John Ford’s “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s “The Changeling,” and Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” All boast storylines involving rape and brutality against women, as does “Fuenteovejuna” by the Spanish Baroque playwright Lope de Vega, later added to Stone’s list of sources.

The resulting saga is divided into three plays, presented in different parts of the Ateliers Berthier, the Théâtre de l’Odéon’s second venue. The central male character, Jean-Baptiste, is seen at different stages of his life, variously engaged in incest, rape and hair-raising sexual role-play with underage girls. He gets a bloody comeuppance, when the trilogy reaches its chronological conclusion, at the hands of a group of women he wronged.

The world premiere of “The Trilogy of Revenge” at the Odéon had to be delayed by a week because the production was unfinished. It still gave that impression during a recent performance, not least because of the sheer complexity of Stone’s concept. Audience members are assigned to a group — A, B or C — as they go in. Each group then sees the three plays in a different order, with intervals in between. The eight cast members, who play multiple characters in all three plays, have to run back and forth between the stages. They repeat this marathon three times every night.

Precise timing is obviously required to synchronize the action, and by the end of the performance, some of the actors simply looked exhausted. Midway through the third story line for group B, even Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who leads a strong cast, appeared to be fully improvising a phone conversation and close to cracking up, perhaps waiting for a cue.

This needlessly complicated setup leaves little space for the kind of subtlety required to achieve Stone’s stated aim: to examine theater’s historical attitudes toward women.

Depicting gender-based violence doesn’t automatically question it. The revenge fantasy that concludes the story, in which Jean-Baptiste is tied up and tortured, is shoddily staged and devoid of tension, with actors repeatedly leaving the stage because their presence is required elsewhere. Jean-Baptiste himself gets to speak far more than any of the women, whose reasoning remains underexplored.

In this case, there is nothing inherently feminist about showing female characters suffering at length before retaliating against a caricature of a misogynist. Homicidal women have been around for a long time, as “Medea” attests, albeit in cautionary tales. Subverting that cliché requires stronger direction than “The Trilogy of Revenge” musters.

There is every reason to believe Stone genuinely wants to be an ally to women. Like a number of his peers, however, he would be a better one if he reined in the publicity to that effect and simply included multilayered, fully realized female characters in all his productions. That would be the strongest feminist statement of all.

Directorial restraint was in similarly short supply in “Who Killed My Father,” which ended a run at the Théâtre de la Colline this past week. (It will begin two weeks of performances at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg on May 2.) The writer Édouard Louis has become a prominent intellectual figure in France since his debut novel-slash-memoir about his working-class education, “The End of Eddy,” was published in 2014. “Who Killed My Father” is his third book; while it was released in print last year, it was actually conceived as a theater project.

The actor Stanislas Nordey, the artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, not only commissioned the work as a vehicle for himself but opted to direct it, too. It seems indulgent for the leader of a major publicly funded theater to invest in what is clearly a personal venture, and Nordey may not have been the right actor to bring this story to life. His grandiloquent, almost patrician diction, so unnatural that it prompted a few laughs, is at odds with the working-class milieu Louis evokes.

The young author treads familiar territory in “Who Killed My Father,” from his family’s poverty to the hatred of homosexuality he encountered growing up, but the book is politically bolder than “The End of Eddy.” It makes the argument that government policies that reduced social benefits took a toll not just on the finances of Louis’ father but also on his health. Louis, a staunch supporter of France’s left-wing opposition and the continuing yellow vest protests, points a finger at President Emmanuel Macron as well as his predecessors.

While Nordey, who is alone onstage for the better part of two hours, spares no effort, a director other than himself might have curbed his actorly mannerisms. Only in a short scene near the end, when he sits down to whisper into a microphone, does he suddenly seem vulnerable. Finally, he starts to convey the ambivalence that “Who Killed My Father” also reveals in Louis’ relationship with his parent.

The hatred the young writer publicly professed, not least in “The End of Eddy,” melts away to suggest there was love there, too, and even growing acceptance on his father’s part. That shift is what allows the audience to connect on a deeper level. Perhaps future productions will mine it further — and give his father a voice as well.

‘The Trilogy of Revenge.’ Directed by Simon Stone. Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, through April 21.

‘Who Killed My Father.’ Directed by Stanislas Nordey. Théâtre de la Colline. Théâtre National de Strasbourg, May 2 through 15.

Onstage in Paris, two directors overreach

PARIS — What makes a theater production feminist? It’s a fraught question, but it needs to be asked. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, directors and theaters have been quick to apply the label to their work, but this haste can reveal its own set of contradictions.

<h1>PARIS — Two related scenes are playing out in theaters here. In “Les Idoles” (“The Idols”), at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, actress Marina Foïs recounts in detail the death of philosopher Michel Foucault, in 1984, of an AIDS-related illness. At the Espace Cardin, Foucault’s homosexuality is seen through the eyes of his first biographer, sociologist Didier Eribon, in “Retour à Reims” (“Returning to Reims”).</h1>

In both productions, prominent French gay artists reclaim their pasts with striking honesty. “Retour à Reims,” staged by German director Thomas Ostermeier, is based on Eribon’s 2009 memoir-cum-essay about his working-class roots, while writer and director Christophe Honoré looks back at the artistic heroes — those “idols” — he lost to AIDS in his youth.

Honoré may be better known for films including “Love Songs,” but his theater work is in some ways more ambitious and original. His recent plays have brought real individuals back to life and imagined, with the benefit of hindsight, how they might have interacted: “Nouveau Roman,” in 2012, focused on the 20th-century French literary movement of the same name; “Les Idoles” brings together six writers and filmmakers who died between 1989 and 1994.

Extensive research clearly went into the play, but Honoré doesn’t strive for truthfulness. He isn’t preoccupied with physical likeness, for starters, and regularly casts women in male roles onstage. In “Les Idoles,” Foïs plays Hervé Guibert, whose autobiographical novel “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” evoked Foucault’s last days, while the part of filmmaker Jacques Demy is taken with gusto by Marlène Saldana, in a fur coat and heels.

Some of the characters in “Les Idoles” enjoy more public recognition than others. Demy is one of them, and playwrights Jean-Luc Lagarce and Bernard-Marie Koltès are both revered names on the French stage. A creation about them might easily have turned into a series of reverential obituaries, but Honoré gives “Les Idoles” a welcome lightness of touch.

The men are portrayed as witty, imperfect individuals rather than austere icons to be worshipped. They are as likely to launch into a dance number as they are to debate the attributes of the ideal lover: Saldana’s rendition of “Chanson d’un jour d'été,” from Demy’s musical film “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” is an unlikely highlight.

The play still brings up unsettling questions about the ways in which the AIDS crisis affected the arts community, in France and beyond. If some of those who died had survived, would their legacy be perceived differently today? Did artists who were sick have a duty to speak up, or was staying in the closet — as Demy did — an acceptable choice? Throughout, Honoré contrasts the crusade by Elizabeth Taylor (also played by Saldana) to raise awareness of the disease and funds for research in the United States with the relative public discretion of artists in France.

The cast contributes expertly tragicomic performances in a production that acts as a lucid, intimate “adieu” to a formative era for Honoré. When filmmaker Cyril Collard is left alone at the end, calling out the names of his dead peers only to be met with silence, the void they left behind is palpable.

Eribon’s “Retour à Reims” is even more personal, but it doesn’t translate as easily to the stage. Ostermeier, who leads Berlin’s Schaubühne theater, has acknowledged there is “nothing theatrical” about the book, which intertwines autobiography and social theory. Regardless, the director has tackled it in three languages: He first adapted it in 2017 with actress Nina Hoss, who performed it in English and in German, and has now brought a French version to Paris.

It’s a spare, unhurried experience. Irène Jacob, replacing Hoss, plays a voice-over artist working on a documentary inspired by Eribon’s experiences. For 45 minutes or so, she merely reads from the book as the fictional documentary — which includes footage of Eribon and his aging mother — unfolds on a screen above her head. Slowly, however, disagreements about the project arise with the filmmaker who hired her, played by Cédric Eeckhout.

Ostermeier originally designed the production to allow Hoss to touch on her own father’s political career in Germany, and the French version feels like a compromise of sorts. In the lead role, Jacob objects to some of Eeckhout’s cuts in the text and to the use of footage from the recent yellow vest protests in France to illustrate a point about the far right, but her character otherwise lacks a strong identity.

The film is only intermittently revelatory, too, giving this “Retour à Reims” a disjointed feel. Although the production marks the first appearance of the yellow vests in French theater, they are discussed only in passing. A third character, played by Blade M.C. Alimbaye, is present throughout and performs a couple of songs, yet a key story — of his African grandfather, who fought for France in World War II — isn’t introduced until the last 10 minutes.

The new year in Paris has also featured two female directors at odds with each other. While Phia Ménard, a Frenchwoman, channeled the feminist anger that crystallized in #MeToo in “Saison Sèche” (“Dry Season”), the polarizing Spanish director Angelica Liddell rails against the same movement in “The Scarlet Letter,” loosely inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel.

The visceral force of Liddell’s confessional monologues has salvaged many of her productions. Not so here. In attempting to react to the social mood, the director and performer, who describes herself as a “recluse,” bites off more than she can chew. “I don’t like this world where women have stopped loving men,” she says early on. “No woman loves enough anymore.” This sets the scene for rants so misogynistic that they would probably land a male performer in artistic exile.

In any event, “The Scarlet Letter” proves so over the top that Liddell’s ode to the superiority of men mostly prompted awkward laughs at one recent performance at the Théâtre de la Colline. The contrast with “Saison Sèche” couldn’t be starker. In Ménard’s latest work, seven women were trapped under a white ceiling that moved up and down. Their way out was to slowly take on the appearance of men, in the style of drag kings, until the walls around them began to visibly erode and crumble.

With no text, this metaphor for the glass ceiling relied entirely on Ménard’s taut staging and precise physical direction. Her vision comes across with increasing clarity these days, just as #MeToo has brought her staunchly feminist stance closer to the mainstream. This might just be a banner year for her.

Les Idoles, directed by Christophe Honoré. Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, through Feb. 1.

Retour à Reims, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Espace Cardin/Théâtre de la Ville, through Feb. 16.

Saison Sèche, directed by Phia Ménard; was at MC93.

The Scarlet Letter, directed by Angelica Liddell. Théâtre de la Colline, through Jan. 26.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ecdd3161-7fef-4b39-a805-8458b6d4353c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/theater/christophe-honore-les-idoles-returning-to-reims-french.html">The New York Times</a>.

Honoré may be better known for films including “Love Songs,” but his theater work is in some ways more ambitious and original.

On Paris stages, gay artists look back

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Laura Cappelle

Articles written by the author

Review: In Robert Lepage's 'Kanata,' the Director, Too, Plays the Victim

Forget 'Game of Thrones.' No one does violence like Euripides

Onstage in Paris, two directors overreach

On Paris stages, gay artists look back