Eric Vautrin: «Racine's resonance with today's world is striking».»10 reading minutes

Le Regard Libre N° 56 - Ivan Garcia

Adventures on stage, episode #3

From October 30 to November 10, 2019, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne welcomes one of the great names of the international theater scene in the person of German director and playwright Frank Castorf. Former director of one of Germany's most famous theaters, the Volksbühne from Berlin, Frank Castorf arrives on the Lausanne stage with a new creation entitled Bajazet. Considering «Le théâtre et la peste» after Jean Racine and Antonin Artaud. In this third episode of our series, Le Regard Libre invites you to a special meeting with Eric Vautrin, dramaturge of the Théâtre de Vidy. He designed the exhibition Castorf-Machine, Frank Castorf's theater in pictures which can be visited free of charge until November 10 in the Kantina of the theater. The exhibition plunges visitors into the dramaturgy and world of this Berlin-based director, intellectual contrarian and former resident of East Germany, whose work is marked by German history. Through texts, videos and images, the exhibition takes visitors to the heart of Castorf's theater, exploring its main themes and working processes. Meet the artist.

Le Regard Libre: With the creation of Bajazet. Considering «Le théâtre et la peste» after Jean Racine and Antonin Artaud, This is the first time that Frank Castorf has come to Lausanne to showcase his art. Why did the Théâtre de Vidy decide to invite this director and offer him a production?

Eric Vautrin: First of all, this visit is part of the project led by Vincent Baudriller, director of the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, to welcome major figures from the European and world theatrical scene to the Vidy stage. Among the latter, Frank Castorf is a key artist of international renown, which makes his presence at Vidy a natural and logical one. But it's true that there's a more specific story behind him. For twenty-five years, Castorf was director of the Volksbühne in Berlin. This institution is an ensemble theater, i.e. it has a permanent cast of actors and actresses, a repertoire of shows and technical resources available to directors. This Berlin-based director therefore had good production conditions at his disposal. However, the Stadttheater* as the Volksbühne have no vocation for touring their shows: the actors perform a different piece from the repertoire each night, and so cannot be away for long - like the Comédie-Française after all, to cite one of the rare examples of French-speaking ensemble theater. After leaving the management of Volksbühne In 2017, Frank Castorf will find in Vidy an organization, teams and technical and artistic know-how similar to those he has come to know in Germany, while at the same time allowing him to imagine taking one of his creations on tour - in the French-speaking world in particular, since this show is performed in French and will be surtitled elsewhere. Frank Castorf is without doubt one of the most important stage directors of the 20th century.^th century, and its encounter with Vidy, as part of this creation and production, is a tremendous opportunity for our institution and the missions it has set itself.

You speak of ensemble theaters and touring, things that seem almost foreign in Switzerland...

However, the theaters in German-speaking Switzerland operate on an ensemble theater system similar to that of Germany. If we take the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, for example, or the Theater Basel, They have an ensemble and a repertoire. Even if Nicolas Stemann, a director who regularly collaborates with Vidy and is now the new director of Schauspielhaus of Zurich, was to evolve this production system by developing co-productions and tours, while maintaining a permanent troupe.

Back to Castorf: a controversial figure on the international stage. A playwright as inventive as he was problematic for the East German government, he continued to create critical works after reunification. Indeed, he never hesitates to oppose what he describes as «bien-pensance». What place does he occupy in Vidy's new season, rich in political works such as War coins in Switzerland by Antoinette Rychner, directed by Maya Bösch, or Orestes in Mosul by Milo Rau? 

Listening to you, we might think that Frank Castorf is a polemicist! However, when Castorf stages shows, I don't think he's in any way trying to stir up scandal. There's no doubt that Castorf's shows question and raise questions; they displace conventional readings of the works and open up new ones. At heart, Castorf's theater is characterized by something singular: he bases himself on literary texts, following their framework and organization, but he doesn't see his position as director as that of an expert whose job it is to reveal what the author really said. In his staging, Castorf questions how the text of Racine, Molière or Céline, for example, resonates with our times: the text is not a reservoir of solutions or good conduct, but a revelator for getting to know ourselves, exploring our limits, testing our freedom. In general, what is highlighted in his shows are the moments of friction that denote something of today. In other words, dramatic tension doesn't arise from a director's desire to provoke the audience; on the contrary, it arises from a show that reformulates issues of our time and their reception by the audience. For Castorf, theater is a way of formulating the problems of our time in a different way, like a cabaret where we have fun with the serious things of our time: it gives us strength and rekindles our imagination. 

Castorf's work as a director has involved many different types of texts (drama, novel adaptations, film scripts, etc.). How would you explain Castorf's choice to turn to Bajazet, a tragedy by Jean Racine, the epitome of French classicism? 

There are many reasons why an artist chooses a work and an author. If we refer to his past shows, the literary genre of the texts seems less relevant than the type of narration. He has mainly focused on texts from the «great twentieth century".^th century» that opens with Goethe or Balzac and closes with Elfriede Jelinek or Michel Houellebecq. This century is, among others, that of the advent of capitalism, that which begins with Freud's discovery of the unconscious, that of Einstein and the theory of relativity, and that of the great political and ideological movements that have attempted to dominate man, nature and society. Castorf has staged numerous texts that describe, from the margins, the consequences of man's mad attempts to dominate his conditions of existence through violence, «to impose the idea on the real», as philosopher Alain Badiou puts it. About Bajazet, it's not so different.

What do you mean?

Firstly, Racine is the classic French playwright par excellence, as his writing weaves together sonority, syntax, grammar and vocabulary to such an extent that very few foreign directors have ventured to stage his plays, either in French or in translation. The second, more interesting element is that Bajazet Racine uses a form of distancing to speak of the France of his time, setting the fable in the Grand Sultan's seraglio in Constantinople. This dramaturgical choice moves the play's plot to a remote location - allowing him to describe more freely the disorders caused when passion and power merge, while casting doubt on the possibility of any purity in human actions. Turkey at the time is also a little-known country, and his text plays on the clichés of his time about Arab culture, Islam and the supposed despotism of the sultanate. This is all the more interesting today, as European clichés about Turkey persist. The resonances of the Racinian text with our own times are striking; they play on what we thought we knew about Turkey, and in turn on how we define ourselves as Europeans. Thirdly and lastly, it's worth pointing out that, in Racine's texts, almost nothing happens other than words with tragic consequences. In other words, the characters act less than they destroy with their words. 

What do you mean?

The most famous of these are Phaedra's confessions: she commits nothing, but is guilty of three confessions - she confesses her passion for Hippolytus three times without committing any other fault. Her desire alone is worth all betrayals. With Racine, the theater becomes the place of the power of the spoken word: to say is to do, as the saying goes. More precisely, Racine's characters emerge from themselves, escape the roles assigned to them by society, and gain intimate, individual freedom through the spoken word. During the preparatory work, Frank Castorf pointed out that, in Racine's work, the human being frees himself through speech by accepting his desire, thus breaking the constraints and contingencies in which he is caught. In Racine, as in Castorf, theater questions social structure and human freedom. The connection with Antonin Artaud, the French poet and playwright whose work transcended the boundaries of his era - the thirties and forties - is thus explained: Artaud literally summons language in order, he says, to be reborn to himself, to become who he is. Castorf thus brings together two great French poets separated by two centuries, in an unexpected but fascinating way.

Finally, as a dramatist who has produced this beautiful exhibition Castorf-Machine, Would you be willing to try and describe Castorf's theater to people who don't know the director, mentioning things we might not have mentioned earlier in this interview?

From a certain point of view, the life we live today in Europe and Switzerland is built on exclusions. We are the representatives and heralds of human rights, yet we know that we can only live as we do because a large part of the world's population does not have access to them, i.e. to live with dignity as human beings. All over the world, our economic interests are at the root of wars and conflicts. Within our own countries, social and wage inequalities are becoming ever more glaring, and we do little to combat them. We live partly by the exclusion of those who are different from ourselves, and this is a source of present and future violence. There are two elements in Frank Castorf's work that echo this reality. Firstly, he advocates the need for a «culture of connection»: in other words, if we don't strive to confront what we don't know and what is fundamentally different from us, we can only expect ever greater violence. Theater can be one of the places where we can renew our relationship with difference, with ways of thinking and living that are foreign to us.

What about the second element?

Overcoming our fear. When we own something - be it a family, a house, a small capital - the fear of losing it is born. This is a particularly visible phenomenon in the middle class, of which I'm a part and you probably are too; much of the violence of the twentieth century has been the result of fear.^th century - and still today - comes from this compact, largely silent majority, prepared to do much to preserve its achievements, however modest, and safeguard its way of life. In short, we could say that Castorf's theater attempts to respond to this fear by staging contradictory behaviors in a theatrically astonishing way, with humor and great freedom of tone. Relevantly, the present interview takes place in Lausanne, in a canton that has adopted a decree against begging: not to solve this issue by creating solidarity, but to avoid the risk of begging. see, to avoid confrontation. Exposing clichés and conflicts is, I believe, an important challenge for Castorf's theater: laughing at the worst is a way of provoking ourselves and testing our freedom.

Write to the author: ivan.garcia@leregardlibre.com

Cover image: © Mathilda Omi  

*Editor's note: Germany has a different theatrical system to France or French-speaking Switzerland, as municipal theaters have their own troupes and repertoires. These are part of the Repertoiresystem and are qualified as Stadttheater. Visit Stadttheater, municipal theaters are financed not by the German state or Land, but by the city in which they are located].