Is the Avignon Festival a carnival, a commercial enterprise, a forum for 'good' theatre or a bit of everything, asks Nehad Selaiha In the second issue of Theatres, the weekly magazine of the Avignon Festival, its editor, Pierre Laville, complained bitterly of the boorish behaviour of the audience on the first night of Eric Lacascade's production of Chekov's Platonov. It took place at the recently renovated open-air Cour d'honneur, the huge courtyard of the mediaeval Palais des Papes which was once described by someone as "made for elephants". Now, thanks to Guy-Claude François, the renovator, the audience have a better view of the stage, better acoustics, more comfortable seats and more leg-room. That night however, it rained heavily for the first part of the performance, which, alone, lasted two hours. Some people, possibly old, or susceptible to pneumonia, or simply unable to take the rain, started to leave, causing the steps and passage ways of the huge metal construction of terraced rows of seats to audibly creak (a fault in the construction as he concedes); in the dark, some of them wisely opted for the shortest route out, which meant sometimes passing right in front of the stage. From the irate M Laville, they get no sympathy and are denounced as "coarse, rude, ill-bred and dull-witted". In the interval more people (presumably better- bred) left and, by the time the second part, another two hours, started, the audience had diminished to a quarter of its original size. But though the rain stopped after a while more people continued to leave, M. Laville vexedly remarks. Those who stuck the show until the end (among them Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the new minister of culture), "their bare heads dripping with water, listening attentively, with fervour, a beatific smile on their faces", warmed M Laville's heart and got his blessings. "The conduct of the audience has changed," he ruefully remarks. "One no longer sees an audience waiting patiently for the interval, regardless of whether or not they like the show, before escaping." "Television," he goes on to explain, "has accustomed them to short spectacles, flicking through channels, and so you see them in the theatre constantly fidgeting or rising from their seats, drinking their bottles of Evian, or chatting with their companions during the performance without regard to their neighbours... They need to be reeducated," he stoutly concludes, "and it is an issue that does not pertain to the festival audiences alone, but concerns all the performance arts." M Laville's remarks surprised me. In my experience French audiences are among the most well- behaved and serious (perhaps a little too serious) theatre audiences in the world. At all the plays I saw in the festival they arrived well before the performance was due, usually armed with their aids to comprehension, in the form of the festival's catalogue, and lined up patiently outside the indicated venue. Once seated, they pored over the play's programme, reverently perusing whatever hype is printed there -- however highfalutin or esoteric -- as if to equip themselves to sit at the banquet of the high priests and priestesses of the temple of theatre. They reminded me sometimes of Muslims performing their ablutions before standing between the hands of God. So seriously did they seem to take theatre they were sometimes reluctant to laugh even when the play was a hilarious comedy. It is as if in buying the ticket they had signed a contract of obedience, surrendering their freedom to an unreasonably rigid and relentless code of conduct regardless of what is offered them. This made me wonder if all the impressive publicity, including press notices and theatre reviews (an essential part of the theatre industry) was not, at least in part, intended to precondition reception and turn the audience into passive, docile consumers. After all, if you are bombarded with publicity, persuaded to swallow it hook, line and sinker, and cough up 20 or 30 euros to be admitted to the sacred shrine of High Art to be initiated, cultivated and elevated, or, at least, enlightened and refined, you are not likely to let your commonsense or sensibility persuade you that what you see on stage does not tally with what you have read or heard about the show from the experts. Rather, you will try to suppress your doubts and stoically bear it; you may even come to regard your boredom as a chastising, sublimating sacrifice that will give you the right later on to boast proudly to your friends that you have been finally canonised as one of the elite. By comparison, an illiterate or half-educated audience, more bent on fun than edification, and however rowdy or undisciplined, is infinitely preferable and makes for a healthier, more lively and genuine theatrical experience. This could perhaps explain the inordinate length of some of the most highly acclaimed entries in this year's festival. Lacascade's version of Chekov's Platonov, Stuart Seide's Le Quatuor d'Alexandrie, based on Lawrence Durrell's thousand-page novel The Alexandria Quartet, and Jean-Pierre Vincent's production of Botho Strauss's modern satire, Le Fou et sa Femme ce soir dans Pancomedia (The Madman and his Wife Perform This Evening in Pancomedia) -- performed by students from the Regional Actors School in Cannes -- were each four hours long. More to the point, in all three cases, after a spectacular, exotic or intriguing beginning, whatever dramatic material, power of invention or imaginative energy the performances had were exhausted within an hour or an hour and a half at the most, and they started to fizzle out and pall. For the rest of their duration, they seemed to repeat themselves endlessly in a futile attempt to stretch out the progressively thinning performance until it frayed and sprang holes and rents. It was a great shame and not a little infuriating, since one felt as if one was being subjected to a sadistic test of stamina which did not even leave the actors out. Lacascade's choice of Platonov -- a rambling, clumsy and melodramatic piece which reads more like a novel in dialogue than a play -- is curious; it was written in 1878 when Chekov was 18 and displays all the faults and shortcomings of an adolescent first work. But then there is no accounting for the quirks of directors' tastes in texts. He is obviously a lover of Chekov, and having already directed Ivanov, The Three Sisters and The Seagull, he may have found something in this early, immature play that fired his imagination, or wanted to trace the characters of the maturer works to their origins in it. Both are legitimate motives and he did manage to create some stunning and highly evocative images by framing the actors, in the initial scenes, singly or in groups, in the windows of the gothic wall of La Cour d'honneur, which forms a natural backdrop to the stage. As the windows were lighted one by one, in a calculated visual crescendo, then variously dimmed according to a subtle rhythm, the series of eloquent window-portraits seemed to play fugal repetitions of thematic notes distributed among the large cast of characters. I was entranced, despite the cold wind which made me shiver, and thought that if a painter had wanted to capture the essence of Chekov's world he could not have done it more masterfully. But when the windows were finally dimmed and melted into the shadows, and the characters descended to the stage to fight out their petty squabbles and tedious amorous rivalries, the spell was broken. For the rest of the evening we had an empty display of technical skill and polish and some elaborate lighting gimmicks -- impressive, but cold, irrelevant, and devoid of anything that stirs the mind or feeling. After watching Platonov, I did not wonder why half the audience had left it half way through on the first night M Laville wrote about, and was even glad of it. Unlike him, I did not think the reason was that television had spoilt them. The play was simply too long and, except for the first half hour, too boring. To expect them to sit through it till the end without a murmur, getting progressively soaked through and numb, risking pneumonia and rheumatic pains as if performing a sacred duty strikes me as a very tall, and very unfair, order. In the following days the urge to flee came over me more often than I liked, and in one case, Le Fou et sa Femme, got the better of me. In less than two hours, the play had completely exhausted its non- too-original theme -- the commercialisation of art and literature in the cultural industry -- the formal variations on its central ironical metaphor of the modern world as a music hall or variety show, as well as all its technical ploys, and its young actors had displayed whatever acting skills they had. After that it began to drag and go round in circles, repeating itself endlessly until I couldn't take it any more. Even the dutifully attentive audience seemed to run out of steam and looked worn out and dazed, as if in a stupor. The note in the programme had compared this loose jumble of scenes to both Aristophanes' comedies and Dante's Purgatory in The Divine Comedy. Ironically, it was the kind of saes pitch this four-hour long show was preaching against. For some reason I found myself remembering what the Brazilian actress and director Neusa Thomasi (who had travelled with her troupe all the way from Paris to Avignon on foot) said about her experience of the festival. In her Walking to Avignon (published in The Open Page theatre journal in March this year) she says: "We arrive in Avignon...The shock. Yes, it is a shop-window, as they say. We have arrived at the theatre market that is slowly subjected to the deterioration of creative freedom. Constraints and constraints, a 'society of men', so meaningless, eaten by the ordinary violence of success made of suspicion and inference where each person feels authorised to judge the other. An invisible trap? A hideous social crisis? Here ethics are worthless. I feel drunk; my head spins with the difficulty of distinguishing the essential from the trivial. The majority of state-subsidised companies with the Fringe groups who have given their last pennies to pay enormous rents are together in this Papal city to finish Jean Vilar's dream." Thomasi's view is that of an artist who believes that "theatre should be lived... should vibrate with more than is seen" and suddenly finds herself caught in a vast commercial enterprise where thousands of artists ruthlessly compete for "a little attention from the press". Her disgust is understandable and undoubtedly shared by many of the thespian tribe. Yet Avignon continues to draw thousands of hopeful theatre people from all over the world, eager for success and ready to pay the price. It also continues to draw thousands of theatre consumers, anxious not to miss the latest on the market. For the first party, the festival can prove a nightmare; for the second, it can offer a few thrills but little of lasting value. If you belong to neither party, keep clear of critics and cultural snobs, mingle with the crowds and allow yourself to enter into the spirit of carnival which permeates the city during the festival, Avignon can still prove an unforgettable experience despite the rampant commercialism. Even if you never set foot inside a theatre you will find it all around you, and if you do, you will soon discover that what you see in the street is often more fun. The lovely architecture of the city, its quaint cobbled streets, the festive atmosphere, the boisterous bands, the wandering minstrels and the weirdly costumed street artists make the whole place feel like one big stage. There, you can wander around freely, laugh aloud, leave whenever you like and even sing and dance, and you will find no M. Laville frowning upon you and threatening to send you back to school to learn the rules of decorum. The ambiance can even make you often forget that for the duration of the festival the city disgorges its regular inhabitants and becomes a gigantic cash register. And occasionally, if you are lucky, you can stumble across a show that touches your heart. This happened to me one afternoon as I was strolling near the old wall of the city. Outside a small open courtyard I saw a sign for Hamlet, ou ce qu'il en reste (Hamlet, or what has remained of him). I was intrigued and stepped inside, and for the next two hours sat on a hard bench, in the blazing sun, with a handful of people, watching six young actors (the usual number of an itinerant company in Shakespeare's time) doing an intelligently adapted version of the play, under a small awning with nothing to aid them except their talent, some recorded music and some quasi-historical costumes. The rough conditions, the daylight, the forceful acting and Shakespeare's words, albeit in French, had a strange impact. I felt back in Shakespeare's days, standing with the groundlings in the Globe, savouring the mystery and magic of theatre. This primitive Hamlet was much more moving than any of the grand, spectacular shows I had seen in the previous days, including Camille and Manolo's sensational La Tragédie de Macbeth, which they performed on horseback in a circus tent. In staging what has remained of Hamlet for us nowadays, Jean-Yves Brignon was perhaps reminding us of what ultimately remains of theatre. Next year, I hope he stages The Avignon Festival, or What Has Remained of It.
