Theatre News from Sibiu to Avignon: Zholdak, Marleau, Warlikowski, Lacascade

Ukrainian director André Zholdak presented Hamlet and Othello at the Sibiu Festival in Romania, the country's best festival. Zholdak orchestrates a deluge of enigmatic yet intoxicating images, aligning with a poetics of 'récriture' (rewriting) as theorized by Aude Clément regarding Carmelo Bene. At the Avignon Festival, Denis Marleau's staging of Maeterlinck's The Blind features six faces that are actually projections of two pre-filmed actors onto wooden masks, creating a ghostly, Beckettian effect. Valérie Dréville, who previously excelled in Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles directed by Claude Régy and in Müller's Medea Material directed by Anatolii Vassiliev, continues her exploration of abstracted body and language. Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Sarah Kane's Purified overcomes previous difficulties with the playwright, achieving a controlled incandescence that Artaud and Grotowski dreamed of. Eric Lacascade's staging of Chekhov's Platonov successfully occupied the Cour d'Honneur, transforming abandoned heroines into tragic figures. The journal Alternatives théâtrales dedicates its latest issue to the return of Maeterlinck on European stages and Denis Marleau's Théâtre Ubu.