What a season ! 140,000 pairs of eyes have seen our productions – a record –, including 10,000 subscribers. It was a challenging program : we presented, among others, no less than four creations by contemporary French playwrights… and yet we sold, day in day out, an average 82% of the available tickets. We fought all the way to Brussels, along with a few other prestigious houses from Belgium, Italy, Spain, Rumania, Sweden (the Théâtre National de la Communauté française de Bruxelles, the Teatro Stabile di Napoli «Mercadante», the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid, the Teatrul National «Radu Stanca» in Sibiu, the Folteatern in Göteborg, respectively), in order to present a joint project, «Villes en Scène / Cities on Stage» – and as a result, for the very first time, the European union will be supporting our partnership during the next five years. Which didn’t stop us from being present at the same time in schools and colleges – totalling 800 hours of work in that sector – not to mention everything we did in the social field, thanks to the precious help of allies such as the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations… Don’t forget «Présent composé», our annual program of meetings with thinkers and writers from all over the world, and the growing success of our Festival Impatience… Who could say we spared our efforts ?
But our next season is already knocking at the door. Our fifth – already. «O saisons, ô châteaux», as Rimbaud wrote in one his last poems : «O seasons, o castles» ! Why does this enigmatic invocation move me so ? What did the poet mean ? His answer lies in the next few verses : «I have studied that magical science, / Happiness, whom none may escape»… The study of happiness is indeed a kind of white magic. One needs a touch of alchemy in order to create a season. Through which untold, secret affinities does it slowly come to acquire its final aspect ? As usual, we have been groping, trying to throw the very best flowers into our retort, without noticing at first that we were approaching a certain dominant fragrance. This year, the North and the East will be providing it, with artists such as Cassiers, van Hove or young Fabrice Murgia from Belgium, the NO99 Theatre from Estonia, our friends Warlikowski, Castorf and Ostermeier who are kind enough to pay us another visit. Is that to say that we deliberately tried to avoid (at least for the time being) my beloved Mediterranean ? Of course not. We were being led by the spirit of the times, and it just came out that way.
In the same way, this new season will borrow most of its beauty to the grace of women, to their astounding capacity to love, to the tremendous suffering it often entails. What great characters ! Juliet and Blanche DuBois, the maid enthralled by love at first sight and the widow who has known more men than she cares to remember and is losing herself in the darker corners of her mind. The courtesan and the saint, Marguerite Gautier and Joan of Arc. Strindberg’s Julie and Pommerat’s Estelle. And all the unknown, all too real women Angélica Liddell commemorates in her passion… Haunting, touching figures, meant for incomparable artists. Be they already famous and worshipped, such as Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar, Juliette Binoche, or mere beginners, such as «my» Juliet, Camille Cobbi, who has barely finished her drama school, each of them is one of a kind, introducing us to another, private world. What cause could explain this sudden blossoming, especially this year, of such splendid parts ? Doesn’t it look as if the artists, throughout the continent, had planned it all together in advance ?
Olivier Py
