STATE OF PLAY

Politics and the real” at the Festival d‘Avignon.

- HELEN SHAW

The Cour d’Honneur at the Palais des Papes plays center stage.

A few nights before the French took their final vote in this summer’s snap parliamentary election, Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Festival d’Avignon, staged an all-night, adhoc rally against the far right in the Cour d’Honneur. This dramatic courtyard in the center of the Palais des Papes has been the festival’s marquee venue since its start, in 1947; audiences enter a steep stone box, open to the sky, with a massive performance area backed by one looming wall of the papal palace. Rodrigues, a Portuguese director, took the reins at the festival two years ago, and his “vision of the stage,” he has said, is a mixture of “the poetical, the political, and the personal.” This year, as the election approached, he declared that, if the nationalists took power, Avignon would become a “festival of resistance.”

The same day I landed in France, on July 7th, that particular electoral storm turned. And yet, despite the lulling heat of a Provençal summer, a sense of barely concealed combat still permeated the festival. (For one thing, you could spot, among the thousands of theatre bills and bulletins pinned around town, a few torn Marine Le Pen posters.) Avignon’s beauty has a tranquillizing effect: the old city’s medieval ramparts kept the (literal) traffic of the modern world at bay, and my gaze often floated up above the crowds to the linen-pale limestone buildings, drowsy behind wooden shutters. But even ten-foot-thick walls couldn’t block out the sound of a continuing, existential parry and thrust. In many productions, you could still hear the clash of right against left, artists against critics, brutal institutions against the vulnerable people they supposedly protect.