Avignon/Paris/Warsaw

Two shows mark midpoint at Avignon 2007, and, by nature of their contrasts, point up a significant challenge to French theater today. On the one hand, there is “Feuillets d’Hypnos”, a much anticipated, site-specific (to the Cour d’Honneur) piece built around the writings of Resistance fighter and poet René Char, by one of the most promising directors of France’s 40-something generation, Avignon Associate Artist Frédéric Fisbach. On the other, Tony Kushner’s two-part, Reagan-era “Angels in America”, revisited in 2007 via Warsaw by one of the most promising directors of Poland’s 40-something generation, Krzysztof Warlikowski. Two adaptations of historically rooted, dense works, both drawing on the means, concerns and styles of the early 21st century, but with starkly different results. Confronted with the albeit poetic, but no less urgent reflections contained in the over 200 notes written by Char in the heat of the French underground struggle against the Nazi occupier, Fisbach imposes a smooth urban esthetic and a facile play to communicate the dark realities of Char the fighter and the irrepressible hope of Char the poet to a contemporary audience who, one feels in Fisbach’s choices, is deemed unable to similarly marry art and conviction. And so, when comparing Fisbach’s “Feuillets” and Warlikowski’s “Angels”, it appears again that the emotional and ethical core of European theater today lies beyond France’s borders. For where Fisbach errs incomprehensibly in favor of the tastes of a self-satisfied consumer society, Warlikowski returns to the attack of contemporary Polish society – Catholic, conservative, even reactionary or extremist in the director’s own words – with Kushner’s sweeping X-ray of the moral, religious and economic excesses of 1980s America at the height of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic. If Warlikowski has opted for a minimalist set where light and mirrors explore the dimensions of what is played within its walls, he better avoids the pitfalls of caricature and sensationalism in discussing gay life, especially in this detailed (5 hour long) examination of it from a now 20 year old perspective. And while Fisbach plays the Resistance cool and catty, Warlikowski goes straight to the fear and taboos surrounding AIDS and homosexuality in Polish society today, in the hope of opening an honest dialogue on these and related questions of sexuality and bigotry. The difference of approach and of intention is striking, between Fisbach and Warlikowski, between a view of theater developed in Paris or defended in Warsaw, both on view at Avignon.

Photos: (left) “Angels in America”, (right) “Feuillets d’Hypnos” ; Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon