76th Festival D'avignon (review)

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Reviewed by:

• 76th Festival D’avignon
• Ljubiša Matić

76TH FESTIVAL D’AVIGNON. Palais des Papes and various other venues, Avignon, France. July 7–26, 2022.

After the collective trauma that made the live (co-) presence of people in public irrelevant, or even dangerous, the breath of a certain freedom soared afresh along the ramparts of Avignon. The longest-running theatre festival in France was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and then returned in 2021 with strict “social distancing” measures in place, which brought forth an atmosphere of crowd management, surveillance, and insecurity. In July 2022, those restrictions were rescinded, which allowed the Festival to once more pervade the one-half-square-mile within the fortifications of the former City of Popes that houses upward of two hundred performing venues. Given that theatre attendance in France had plummeted by as much as thirty percent compared to pre-COVID times, theatre companies were eager to embrace the Avignon festival as a way to revitalize attendance at live art events.

By dehierarchizing and depersonalizing dramatis personae, as well as assembling them as choruses and in chorus-like configurations, several festival productions reflected on the tensions surrounding contemporary collectivism. Specificall, the festival spoke to lingering tensions regarding governmental policies enacted during the pandemic in the name of collective values and public health, which were perceived by some members of the public as examples of latent authoritarianism. As if to suggest ways out of this impasse, the choral formations, as well as the dehierarchization of dramatic character, necessitated performers’ multidisciplinary versatility and volatility, hinting at an artistic ambivalence that elided overt contestations between the state and the individual.

After Russian authorities disbanded his Moscow theatre, the popular Gogol Center, Kirill Serebrennikov became the first Russian artist to have the honor of opening the Avignon festivities with a premiere at the Palais des Papes. Although the director had long been considered an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s politics, and since 2021 an antiwar spokesman to boot, he was chosen as the festival’s drawing card long before the February 2022 onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the same token, his conceptualization of the play The Black Monk (The Чёрный Mönch)—co-produced by the Gogol Center, Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, and, as rumor had it, Russian tycoons who defected to Berlin—predated the war’s outbreak. The mixed critical reception of the show, which had attracted considerable attention from festivalgoers, was due partly to the audience’s inflated expectations as well as to the artistic team’s unfulfilled ambitions.

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Heavenly bodies as the archetype of the chorus in The Black Monk. (Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.)

The Black Monk is based on a meditative, intimist novella by Anton Chekhov that explores questions of insanity and delusions of grandeur. Serebrennikov [End Page 102] elevated his source text into a Gesamtkunstwerk that felt even more grandiose for having been staged under the imposing walls of the Court of Honor, which seats 2,500 spectators. Four distinct sections of the play allowed the spectators to linger over the perspectives of central characters: an overworked young intellectual Kovrin, who is haunted by hallucinations of a black-robed monk convincing him he is chosen by God for his genius to save mankind from millennia of suffering; his foster father, who offers him refuge at the countryside estate with breathtaking gardens where he grew up; his wife, who is compelled to cajole him into undergoing treatment, after which he regains mental health but loses joy in life and thus starts missing conversations with the monk; and the apparition itself, brought back one last time by Kovrin’s own remorse for ruining his family, in an encounter that leads to his death—with his face frozen in a blissful smile.

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“Crammed together into a rectangle in the middle of the stage” in Solitaire. (Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.)

To develop an aesthetic that would intimidate the spectators by penetrating the mechanisms of madness, the dissident director went beyond intensifying Kovrin’s frenzy and aggressiveness. In the production, which largely adhered to the...