It takes stamina, immense powers of concentration and a genuine love of theatre to do what Bernard Faivre d'Arcier does. The director of the Avignon Festival attends performances on 270 nights of the year, narrowing down directors, actors and playwrights to his own exclusive selection.
On Friday, when the 56th annual Avignon Festival opens, Faivre d'Arcier will be on edge. This is the 14th time he has directed France's main theatre festival, but it is always a gamble. "I haven't seen the performances," he explains.
"We had to decide eight months to a year ago. Sometimes we're familiar with the text, sometimes it hasn't been translated, and sometimes it hasn't even been written. I go to rehearsals, but you're never sure how it will turn out. Theatre-goers share the risk I take. I have stage fright every day of the festival." Despite decades of experience, Faivre d'Arcier says there's an inevitable failure rate of about 10 per cent. Theatre is more extreme, more unpredictable, than cinema or television, he explains. "You don't feel the same emotion when you see something on a screen as on stage. Either you're bored to death, or it's miraculous." Fortunately, of the 40 theatre and dance performances he chooses, "four or five are real events - experiences that stay with people, that become legend. We don't give prizes like Cannes; there is no jury. The public is the jury." The festival sells 110,000 tickets for the mainstream "in" programme, while the unorganised "off" festival sells at least 300,000 The main limit is the huge demand for hotel rooms, with some theatre-goers staying up to 50 km away. The ambiance in Avignon is unique. Open public debates bring together actors, directors and critics. People congregate in the pedestrian district in the heart of the walled medieval city. On the café terraces, strangers strike up conversations easily, discussing the plays they've seen until the early hours of the morning.
Faivre d'Arcier is obviously concerned that the political right's recent conquest of all French political institutions could alter this wonderful tradition. The thoughtful, bearded, 58-year-old figure of French cultural life is identified with the left, having been an adviser to Lionel Jospin, Laurent Fabius and Jack Lang. Although Faivre d'Arcier graduated from the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) in the same class as several prominent Gaullists, he's on the wrong side of France's political rift now. "One is always worried," he admits. "I'm not sure what's going to happen. Jean-Jacques Aillagon (the former director of the Pompidou Centre and the new culture minister) knows artists well, and he has Jacques Chirac's ear - that's most important." Although Avignon has a right-wing local government, the festival has long been associated with fashionable left-wing intellectuals.
It was founded by the director Jean Vilar in 1947. Until 1964, Vilar presented mostly classics performed by his own troupe, the Théâtre National Populaire. All performances took place in the spectacular Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes, which is still the festival's most prestigious venue. "By 1964, the festival had become very big," Faivre d'Arcier says. "Vilar wanted to bring in other trends, other theatrical companies. The city is rich in historical monuments, so he expanded to places like the cloisters. The festival went from being a communion between Vilar's troupe and the audience to a confrontation of different styles, schools and ways of doing theatre."
In 1966, Vilar introduced dance to the festival, launching the career of the choreographer Maurice Béjart. Music and opera are performed at the nearby Aix and Orange festivals.
To this day, Avignon remains an eclectic mix of generations, classic and new works, French and foreign artists. The May 1968 revolution nearly destroyed it. "The left found fault with Vilar and the festival," Faivre d'Arcier says. "There were fist-fights and the festival had to be shut down. The same thing happened at (the) Cannes (Film Festival)."
Avignon's "off" festival - the equivalent of the "fringe" festival in Edinburgh - originated in May 1968. "The 'off' has no organisation," Faivre d'Arcier explains. "It's anarchical. Anyone who wants to stage his own production can, if he finds space and has the means. It's a parasitical phenomenon, on the sidelines." Snobs often claim that the "off" is more interesting than the professional "in" festival. "That may have been true in the 1970s and 1980s," Faivre d'Arcier says. "It offered an artistic alternative, an underground, counter-culture movement. These days, it's calmer. It's a way of promoting your production, of finding a public." New playwrights are the only possible discovery in the "off" now, he adds.
Until Faivre d'Arcier returned in 1993 after a nine-year absence, Avignon was known as a communist festival. Although he - and the end of the Cold War - de-politicised it, theatre still has political content. Last year, he presented an eight-hour play on the Rwandan genocide, based on testimony and documents. "This year we have a play called Mein Kampf, written by a Hungarian Jew who lives in Germany. George Tabori is an 83-year-old survivor of the Nazi death camps. He wrote a comedy, a satire, in which God, a Jew and Adolf Hitler meet on stage." During Le Pen's presidential campaign, the National Front complained that there were too many anti-Nazi and anti-colonialist plays at Avignon.
"I always try to present several types of writing, several schools, several trends," Faivre d'Arcier says. "Some are more political than others; some are deeply political without it showing." For example, Junun (dementia) by Jalila Baccar, is a dialogue between a young schizophrenic and his psychoanalyst. "It denounces all that is wrong with Tunisian society, which is torn between Islam, sexuality and identity crisis - without politics being mentioned." Junun will be performed in the medieval cloisters, in Arabic. The French text can be read on a narrow screen above the stage - the same system used at the Paris opera. Other productions will be staged in Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish and Bulgarian. The Festival sells fewer tickets for foreign languages performances. "But, little by little, people come back, once they've had a good experience. They learn by word of mouth that a play's worth discovering." There are no plays in English, although Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, adapted by the American director Stuart Seide, will be performed in French. So will Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, the third play of his Leenane trilogy. Its French director, Bernard Bloch, has a passion for Irish theatre and previously translated two plays by Tom Murphy.
THE ministry of culture and local authorities provide 60 per cent of the Avignon Festival's €9m budget. Private sponsors provide 5 per cent, and 35 per cent comes from ticket sales.
Some of the greatest talents in theatre have ended up in France, thanks to the government's generous subsidisation of the arts. Peter Brook is the best known refugee from English-speaking theatre to have settled in France. Faivre d'Arcier calls Declan Donnellan, who directed the Cheek By Jowl theatre company in Britain, Brook's successor. "He couldn't work anymore in Britain because there were no subsidies, so he came to France." Faivre d'Arcier invited Donnellan to Avignon three years ago, where he directed Corneille's Le Cid in French. "He revolutionised it, with a humour and detachment that no Frenchman could match." Donnellan's production was performed - in French - in London, where it was judged the best foreign play, and it won a Tony award in the US. "He's good at dusting off classics," Faivre d'Arcier says. Their latest project, Pushkin's Boris Godunov, performed in Russian by Russian actors, is now touring Latin America.
Faivre d'Arcier divides the theatrical world into three distinct groups: the Anglo-Saxons, whom he accuses of being "closed in on themselves, looking across the Atlantic - their big break is to perform in New York and win a Tony award". Then there are the Germans and Poles, Bulgarians and Russians. "It's big machine theatre - huge sets, permanent troupes with 300 employees." Faivre d'Arcier praises the writing of the Anglo-Saxons, the Germans and Russians. The third, Latin, type of theatre, typical of France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal, is characterised by smaller troupes, about 30-strong. "The French speciality is the quality of directors," he adds.
Although there are great living theatre directors, like Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, Faivre d'Arcier says there has been no clearly identified school or movement in theatre anywhere - not just in France - for two decades. The legacy of post-second World War theatre is one of cruelty. Yes, there are humorous plays at Avignon - Faivre d'Arcier mentions the Bulgarian Stefan Moskov's Commedia del servitore, about valets and their masters, and Carlo Goldoni's classic Holiday Trilogy. "But most often, the plays are cruel, tense, tragic," he admits. "It's an accurate reflection of the world. Sometimes it's rough going. We don't do light summer entertainment."
