All The World’s A Stage

Summer is well and truly here, and summer in Provence means festivals. We've already written a little about the renowned  Festival d'Art Lyrique d'Aix-en-Provence, which showers festival-goers with an abundance of music and opera. But those of you who know us well will remember that our real passion is theatre. And in Provence in the summer, there is one venue absolutely not to be missed, the world famous Festival d'Avignon.

le palais des Papes

All the world's a stage, said Shakespeare in As You Like It and for three weeks of the Avignon festival, the whole of the city and much more becomes one huge, exciting performance area. The festival began in 1947, when Jean Vilar was asked to put on a play in Avignon. He chose T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, performed in the courtyard of Le Palais des Papes, the Popes' palace, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Festival today is a huge event. There is the official programme, with over 30 shows, many of them French premieres. The official event attracts about 3,500 arts professionals and will sell roughly 150,000 tickets this year.  In addition, there is the "0ff," where hundreds of groups come to present their plays in the hope of recognition and an official engagement at a theatre somewhere in France in the future.

Competition is fierce. The "off" is so huge it now has its own management board, a bit of a contradiction in terms. This year, 2012, it consists of 1161 different shows, with companies from 25 countries playing at 117 different venues.

So we decide to take a break from the humdrum business of plumbing leaks and cleaning, and spend a day at the Avignon festival. And what a break! The atmosphere is electric! Every lamppost and every fence is covered with posters. Every street corner has an artist handing out publicity leaflets, and every performance space is utilized at all hours of the day and night. The programme just for the off festival runs to 396 pages. Where to begin?

Technology to the rescue. You can download an iPhone application which contains the entire programme. This allows you to search by any category you care to name - by type of show, by date you will be in town, by troupe if you have favorite artists, by performance space if you are limited geographically, even by time of day or shows suitable for different age groups.

We search by theatre and date, but even with these parameters we are still overwhelmed by what is available. So we scan, waiting for something to catch our eye. The first we settle for is a play in English, The Servant of Two Masters by Goldoni, translated from Italian and presented jointly by Compagnie Bacchus and James Madison University in Virginia. We call to reserve.

What else? We plan to go to Avignon for the day, so we need to catch at least one more show. We continue to leaf through the programme, and here it is: Être ou ne pas être, To Be or Not to Be. Scenario, an actor longs to perform ten of the great soliloquys from Shakespeare, in French. As both Shakespeare buffs and French speakers, how can we resist?

The drive to Avignon from Aix is just over an hour on well-maintained autoroutes with tolls or péage. First challenge on arriving, find a parking space. Last time we visited, there were excellent out-of-town parking sites with free shuttle busses to town. But for all its 396 pages of programming, the iPhone application mentions not one word about parking. We try sites we know first, around the ramparts or walls of the historic city centre. Not a hope. So we move gradually further out, trying every side street and every public parking area. Still nothing. The situation is becoming urgent. We turn down one particularly narrow side street, and spot a space. Well, a kind of space, on a central reservation. After much delicate manoeuvering, we manage to get the car off the road and jammed between a signpost and a plane tree.

And set off to walk.... and walk....and walk some more, with temperatures of over 90F at midday. We make it to the theatre, three stages, a different play in each space every two hours. We secure our tickets and sit down for a welcome break in - yes! - an air-conditioned space with bar and clean toilets!

It's time for the show. We file in to the tiny theatre, with fewer than 50 seats and the magic begins. This is a one-man show, but what a man and what a show! Luca Franceschi plays the role of an actor whose dream is to present the great speeches from Shakespeare. A stage actor in French is a comédien, the word acteur being reserved for a film actor. He gives us To Be or Not to Be in grand style. But he decides he needs help, and so creates a character (un personnage) to help him with the performance. He switches masterfully between his role as grand actor and his role as character. But wait! The character begins to take over! Can the character exist without the actor? Clearly not. But can the actor exist without the character? Yes, you might say, but ponder a little. If he is not playing the role of a character, is an actor still an actor? The margins blur, the personalities blend, and little by little the character hijacks the performance. The play is in French, but the strength of the performance is such that we are carried along by the body-language and emotions, and have no problems with the French. An absolutely first-class performance by Luca Franceschi.

Time for lunch. We wander along the eclectic Rue des Teinturiers which we remember fondly, but decide this is a little too bohemian for our ageing tastes and make out way to the Place de l'Horloge. At three in the afternoon we have lots of choice, no pressure, no rush, and we settle for a couscous restaurant. Lunch is punctuated by lines of costumed actors, personal appeals by hopeful thespians, handouts for every type of show imaginable, from Feydeau to Sophocles to Woody Allen, from circus to poetry to flamenco dance.

It's five o'clock now, just time to make our way back to the car and drive to a nearby village. The Servant of Two Masters is presented in la cité médiévale at Montfavet, in the courtyard of a church and monastery, where the white plastic chairs contrast strangely with the solid stone walls and cobbled paving.
It's the perfect setting for this play, performed in Commedia dell’arte style complete with masks. We allow ourselves to be beguiled by the comic world of disappointed lovers, missing siblings, women dressed as men and a poor servant trying to earn an honest (well almost) crust. This is a comedy, so of course the wily servant prevails, the disguised woman sheds her masculine attire, the young lovers are united, and all ends happily.

Two shows, one in English, one in French, are our limit for the day.
So we are stunned to hear of a friend who made it to six shows in a day, and is going back for more.

That’s Avignon for you. For theatre buffs, there is no such word as "enough."

© 2012 Trevor and Valerie White