The Power of Parables in Contemporary Theatre: Warlikowski and Mouawad

In a 2019 essay for artpress, critic Georges Banu argues that parables are the highest form of theatre, citing recent productions by Krzysztof Warlikowski and Wajdi Mouawad. Warlikowski staged Leoš Janáček's opera 'From the House of the Dead' (based on Dostoevsky) at La Monnaie in Brussels (May 2018) and the Opéra de Lyon (January–February 2019). His production, designed with Małgorzata Szczęśniak, updates the Russian setting to evoke modern prisons, opening with a basketball player and projected interviews with Michel Foucault and a young South African prisoner. It incorporates references to James Ensor's masks and Fernando Botero's silhouettes, and features a political dissident (a black singer reminiscent of Nelson Mandela) undergoing incarceration. Banu contrasts this with Patrice Chéreau's earlier, more choral and funereal staging. Separately, Mouawad's play 'Tous des oiseaux' (Théâtre de la Colline, Paris, November–December 2018) presents a contemporary parable about identity: a Jewish father rejects his son's marriage to a Muslim woman, only to discover he himself was an abandoned Arab child. Banu links this to the Sufi parable 'The Conference of the Birds' staged by Peter Brook, and to Brecht's 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle'. He concludes that parables remain open questions, never fully answered.