GENERAL PROGRAMME
PINOCCHIO
What is a human being ? How do you become one? At the onset of the story, Pinocchio is but a puppet in this world, whose ideal is to get rich and “live a Prince’s life, just like in the papers.” Carlo Collodi’s tale, re-written here by Joel Pommerat is equally fierce and funny. Language, use of scenic space and acting style concur to bring each spectator, regardless of age, in contact with his nightmares and dreams. A mesmerizing quest for truth, nothing less. Pommerat created Au Monde (2004) and The Merchants (2006) for the TNS.
A MIDSUMMERNIGHT’S DREAM
A wedding, mechanics rehearsing a play that is “merry and tragical”, lovers that elope into the forest just as a quarrel erupts between the King and Queen of fairies… This comedy by William Shakespeare celebrates the art of illusion. Yann-Joël Collin seizes it to celebrate the stage and fully expose the fabrication of illusion to the spectator, revealing as he proceeds all human motives. In full festive mood, role playing is laid bare and the audience becomes an active partner.
A MACHINE WITHOUT A TARGET
An author wishes to write about love and intelligence. In presence of a “Random Number Generator,” a robot that traces chaotic trajectories, he gathers friends and gets them to talk about what may connect the two concepts. Can a machine be influenced by love?
The author, actor and director Gildas Milin is interested in the limited, unspeakable and un-measurable ways in which we perceive reality.
VIEUX CARRÉ
As was the case in The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams’ first success), Vieux Carré takes place in the memory. The author-narrator turns back onto his past remembrances. He sees himself in the 1930s, in the squalid furnished apartment that witnessed his sexual and artistic awakening.
Reverberating as it does a foggy past in the bare and crude light of the present, the Wooster Group’s Vieux Carré takes us into the heart of Tennessee Williams’s lyricism.
MADAME DE SADE
In response to his allegedly immoral sexual practices, the Marquis de Sade is incarcerated. His mother, the Marquise confronts her vision of her son to his wife’s and two other women’s. Doing this, they give their take on love, social order and freedom. Jacques Vincey presents those characters like “insects floating by a lamp, feverishly fluttering around an invisible flame.” The women exchange scathing witticisms as passion is unleashed despite the constraint of corsets and wigs.
IN THE MIDST OF DISORDER
In The Midst of Disorder, Pierre Meunier deals with stones, springs, heaps, falls, and movement. Those are as many questions and experiences that the audience is invited to share, precious opportunities to look at people and things with new eyes, which we too rarely do. A DIY alchemist of a director, Meunier astounds us, moves us and makes us laugh. A fountain of youth for the eye and the mind.
WOYZECK IN THE HIGHVELD
Woyzeck in the Highveld is a puppet show for adults. Büchner’s play is here transposed in the Johannesburg of the 1950s, a city on a rampage race to industrialization.
This production was created in 1992 when the director, visual and video artist William Kentridge – made famous by the animated movies based on his charcoal drawings – met the prize-winning puppet designer Adrian Kohler and his Handstring Puppet Company. The show, which was greeted with a huge international success, will end its journey at the TNS.
SEA ODE
Sea Ode is a dazzling poem of unfurled lyricism. In a wide sweep of freedom, it subverts the frontiers of meaning and assaults all the senses. The evocation of a distant passing ship brings on the exaltation of the great sea expeditions of yore, but also memories of pirates and massacres, of rapes, victims and oppressors.
Claude Regy, who discovered the greatest authors of the twentieth century, now entrusts this poem to Jean-Quentin Châtelain, whom he describes as: “A sensitive frailty and the strength of a Titan. Absolute mastery and thirst for infinity.”
SEXAMOR
What is sex? For Pierre Meunier, “Sex is a word.” “It is only a word, but not a word that leaves you alone. Some words – slope, chair or shore – we can simply sit on and think of other things. This is not the case with “sex”. Why is that?”
Facing each other, a man and a woman experience otherness; the language of words and that of bodies translates itself into humor and poetry. The other is an enigma and a field of discovery that awakens all types of desires, and among those, the desire to be and feel alive.
Pierre Meunier writes and plays here with Nadège Prugnard.
UNDER THE GAZE OF OEDIPUS
“Under the gaze of Oedipus is an attempt to condense the children of the House of Labacus’ gory destiny into a single night and a single text”, writes Joël Jouhanneau. “I have embarked on that journey to understand what a curse is. From the inside”. Drawing on the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Yannis Ritsos, the director does indeed give us an insider’s view of the tragic family’s intimacy, of the secret ties that bind it, and of the power structures and resentments that tear it apart.
A STRINDBERG TRILOGY
Julie, Jean and Kristine (based on Mademoiselle Julie)
It is Midsummer night. A night of festivities. Mademoiselle Julie (the Count’s daughter) is alone in the castle with the servants: Kristine (the cook) and her fiancé Jean (the butler). But “Mademoiselle Julie is mad tonight,” and the kitchen becomes a stage for strange games of power and seduction. In this version, which Margaritta Mlladenova has rechristened “Julie, Jean and Kristine,” the three characters find themselves trapped in extreme triangular tension.
The dance of death
On an island that people call “Little Hell”, Edgar (an artillery captain), and Alice (a former actress) are about to celebrate their silver jubilee. But over twenty five years of union, love has been replaced by hatred: hatred of the other and hatred of the self. Both partners have become experts in destruction and biting witticisms. Death is their companion. Enters their old friend Kurt, who will try to overturn the situation.
Strindberg in Damascus
From the threefold structure of The Road to Damascus, Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev have drawn “a journey through Strindberg’s dreams that documents known facts and suppositions about the author’s life. It is a journey through what his crises – these human, all too human trials of the mind – might have been, a journey that stretches the barriers of reality and sometime offers no return.”
PHILOCTETE
For his Philoctete, Heiner Muller has freely tapped into Sophocles’ play, but he boldly summons a world that is godless, without chorus and salvation. In this play, written in 1964 – maybe the dramatist’s most metaphorical and linguistically dense – he scans the history of the twentieth century with a cruel and disillusioned eye.
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
The Cherry Orchard is not simply about selling a house, a garden, a magnificent estate and a child’s room. It asks what is to be made of memories when one leaves a house for good. How can we reconcile our present lives with our past? Should we forget everything to be able to move on? Where can we find the strength it takes to leave?
The Cherry Orchard is Julie Brochen’s first creation for the TNS. She has surrounded (herself) with old companions and new recruits to open this new artistic residency.