Three stage works in Paris by the incoming director of the Avignon Festival continue his preoccupation with empathy and human complexity.
PARIS — There is something about the Portuguese writer and director Tiago Rodrigues that inspires affection. It is an odd thing to feel about an artist in his position: As the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, one of the biggest events on the European performance calendar, he is suddenly a very powerful man in French theater — and with that comes a new level of critical scrutiny.
Yet time and again over the past month, as three of Rodrigues’s productions were presented in quick succession in Paris, the heartfelt, considerate way in which he approached characters melted my heart. First, there were the stories of humanitarian workers teetering between miracle and catastrophe in “Insofar as the Impossible.” “Lovers’ Choir,” a chamber work in which two voices speaking in unison somehow become a potent metaphor for mutual devotion, followed.
And then came “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists,” a work that simply shouldn’t work the way it does. Just try to picture a successful play about a family whose quirky little tradition is to hunt down and kill fascists — until the youngest daughter struggles with becoming a, you know, murderer.
If the premise of “Catarina” sounds histrionic, the result is anything but. As a rule, Rodrigues isn’t a showy director: He is a humanist at heart, preoccupied with empathy and the ways in which today’s world undermines it. His actors tend to address the audience frontally yet modestly, as if asking us to bear witness to each character’s doubts and flaws.
“Catarina” and “Lovers’ Choir” were programmed as a double bill of sorts at the Bouffes du Nord. The 45-minute “Lovers’ Choir,” in an early evening slot, is an unassuming sequel to the first play Rodrigues wrote, in Lisbon, 15 years ago. In it, a couple experience a life-or-death emergency: A woman suddenly can’t breathe, so her partner drives her to the hospital, against the clock.
Rodrigues has revived and expanded the story in this new version, created last year for French actors. At the start, Alma Palacios and David Geselson stand side by side, looking ahead at the auditorium yet united in fear, as they begin their race to find medical help. They speak in sync throughout. When she says, “I can’t breathe,” he says, “She can’t breathe” at the same time; on a nearly bare stage, they bring the scene to life solely through their intertwined words, a chorus of two.
It makes for a delicately urgent narrative, in which breathing together comes to represent both love and life. When Palacios and Geselson are purposely out of sync, here and there, you know danger lurks.
The second half throws this new version of “Lovers’ Choir” out of balance, however. Once the emergency is dealt with, the story suddenly accelerates. The characters zoom through the ensuing decades, listing milestones in their lives without giving us much time to latch onto them.
“Insofar as the Impossible” and “Catarina” show how much Rodrigues’s work has gained in ambition over the years. His rise to prominence in France in the 2010s came via intimate, confessional works, like 2013’s “By Heart,” in which he shared the life of his grandmother and asked audience members to memorize a poem, and 2017’s “Sopro,” which starred the longtime prompter of the theater Rodrigues directed in Lisbon until recently, the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II.
There are real stories at the heart of “Insofar as the Impossible,” too. The script of this production, at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, wove together excerpts from 30 or so interviews that Rodrigues and his team conducted with humanitarian workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
It fits into a style of documentary theater that has become popular in recent years. While French directors like Didier Ruiz have brought interviewees to the stage, however, Rodrigues has entrusted their words to four actors, who speak in a mix of French, English and Portuguese, in keeping with Rodrigues’s love of multilingualism. (He announced recently that under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year at the Avignon Festival, starting with English in 2023.)
Throughout, the geographical areas that humanitarian workers travel to — to provide relief from war, disasters or other emergencies — are referred to as “the Impossible,” and the comfortable Western homes they leave behind are “the Possible.” It means the audience can’t connect the anecdotes with what they may know of the region or the conflict; instead, we are invited to consider how violence, inhumanity — and dignity, too — manifest regardless of culture.
Wisely, given the gut-punching nature of many scenes, Rodrigues treads lightly as director. The sets stop at a large white cloth that is slowly pulled above the stage. Many of the situations described are too harrowing to summarize neatly; suffice to say that, while humanitarian workers generally choose their line of work out of a desire to do good, “doing good” turns out to be a lot more complicated than it seems.
Making a virtuous contribution is also what drives the family at the heart of “Catarina,” a work of fiction Rodrigues created with a Portuguese cast. To this family, however, that means capturing a fascist each year, following a tradition passed down by a female relative who, in the 1950s, avenged the death of her friend Catarina under Portugal’s military dictatorship. Per her wish, all her descendants are called Catarina, regardless of gender, and in Rodrigues’s engaging production, wear long dresses and aprons.
Each death and garden burial is celebrated with songs and a banquet. Yet the youngest Catarina, who was raised to kill and is about to shoot her first victim, starts experiencing doubts about her right to take a life.
In a recurring joke, the characters keep quoting the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and like Brecht, Rodrigues nudges the audience to adopt a critical perspective. Rodrigues’s father was an antifascist activist, and “Catarina” is preoccupied with weighty political questions: When fascist forces are on the rise in a democracy, what are the best means of countering them? Is “doing harm in order to practice good,” the family’s motto, morally acceptable?
Many of the conversations that result between relatives — a mother urging her daughter to violence; a sister angling to take her place — could easily turn into caricatures, yet Rodrigues refuses to give the audience an easy path out of these ethical dilemmas. He doesn’t shy away from showing us what he means by fascism, either. One lengthy scene is devoted to a far-right political speech full of such hatred toward minorities that Rodrigues seems to be testing our endurance.
Yet even this part of “Catarina” feels like an invitation to grapple with what humanity is capable of, rather than a didactic demonstration. Complexity is always the answer in Rodrigues’s work — and it is one of the best ways to the audience’s heart.
Dans la Mesure de l’Impossible. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe/Festival d’Automne. Further performances in 2022 and 2023 around France and in Madrid.
Chœur des Amants. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, through Oct. 29.
Catarina et la Beauté de Tuer des Fascistes. Directed by Tiago Rodrigues. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord/Festival d’Automne, through Oct. 30.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
