LONDON — Ruth Mackenzie broke boundaries as the artistic director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, one of Paris’ most famous stages.
In 2017, she became the first woman to run the theater, which opened in 1862. Shortly after she took office, the Châtelet closed for a two-and-a-half-year, $35 million renovation, and Mackenzie used that time to reinvent the institution. When it reopened last fall, the revamped programming made headlines and appealed to new audiences, including from Paris’s poor suburbs. Last October, for example, it staged “Les Justes,” a rap musical based on a work by Albert Camus. The production’s director, Abd al Malik, was the first Black artist to direct a play at the theater.
Now, Mackenzie has been fired.
The theater’s board dismissed her with immediate effect on Thursday, she said in a telephone interview. A letter from the board said that she had bullied employees, Mackenzie said, an accusation that she denied.
“There’s a level of betrayal,” she said of her feelings about the decision. “It’s a high price to pay for moving here, writing a 10-year vision and starting it with some beautiful work with artists and audiences that hadn’t had a chance to go to this theater before.”
She said she would seek legal advice to challenge the decision.
In a short news release, the theater said Mackenzie had left with immediate effect, and a spokesman declined to answer any questions about her departure.
Mackenzie’s time at the Châtelet was not without problems. In 2019, before its official reopening, the theater hosted “DAU,” a much-hyped but poorly executed immersive theater work. Visitors complained of waiting in line for hours to see a half-finished spectacle.
The grumbling continued once the official programming began. Many critics said that the theater’s opening show, “Parade,” a reworking of a famous ballet that premiered at the Châtelet in 1917, was shallow; others complained that it used amateur performers who weren’t paid. The thumping music in “Room With a View,” a dance piece developed with the French electronic music producer Rone, led to noise complaints from a nearby hotel.
Ariane Bavelier, the deputy culture editor at Le Figaro, a conservative French newspaper, criticized several productions from Mackenzie’s tenure in a text message exchange. “Parade,” she said, was “more showbiz than the sophisticated refinement expected in that house,” while she described “DAU” as “a fiasco.” It was “poorly organized, slow, pretentious and without much to see,” she said. Other works in the season, she said, were unoriginal or had already been shown elsewhere.
But, Bavelier said, Mackenzie “wasn’t fired because of her programming.”
Mackenzie said that two employees from the theater’s marketing department had complained about her while the theater was closed during the coronavirus lockdown, which had led to an official inquiry. “I had Covid and then pneumonia, so it was quite tough being interrogated by Zoom,” Mackenzie said.
Mackenzie said that the inquiry’s final report had cleared her of the bullying accusations. “It says some rude things about me,” she said. “It says I don’t speak French very well, and it says some people in the theater found it culturally hard to adjust to my vision. But it could not prove bullying. Nonetheless, they have fired me, citing bullying.”
She conceded that some of her programming decisions had not been popular with the theater’s traditional audience. “It was exactly the readers of Le Figaro who found the adjustments from the old Châtelet to the new Châtelet difficult,” she said.
Mackenzie said she was “heartbroken” by being fired, but hoped that the theater would continue on the path she had set for it.
“My vision is a citizens theater, it’s an activists theater,” she said. “We want the theater to show to the world Paris’s values. I hope that continues.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
