At Avignon Festival, Resisting the Far Right

There are two sides to Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese director who has led the Avignon Festival since last year. One — gentle, introspective, given to dissecting intimate human conflicts — has long been evident in his stage productions. That includes “Hecuba, Not Hecuba,” his latest premiere in Avignon, in which a mother fights for justice after her son is mistreated by a state institution.

On the other side, Rodrigues has also turned out to be a combative, politically outspoken leader for the French festival, a marquee event on the international theater calendar. Tension is running high in France since the far-right National Rally party came out ahead in the first round of snap parliamentary elections last weekend, and Rodrigues’s response was forceful: Avignon, he told the broadcaster France Info, would become a “festival of resistance.”

On Thursday, Rodrigues pulled together a last-minute night of programming aimed at “mobilizing against the far right” ahead of the second round of voting this Sunday. After a performance of Angélica Liddell’s “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman,” the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s biggest stage, was given over to willing artists, politicians and union leaders from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.

The choreographer Boris Charmatz opened the evening with 100 or so dancers who performed a group reinterpretation of “Revolutionary,” a defiant 1922 dance by Isadora Duncan. JoeyStarr, a French rapper, recited a poem by Léon-Gontran Damas.

Despite the late hour, the nearly 2,000 seats were packed, and a roar filled the air when Rodrigues, whose father was an antifascist activist in Portugal, finally appeared onstage. “My name is Tiago Rodrigues, and I work for the Avignon Festival,” he said, modestly. “This is a night of democratic union, of strength and hope.”

Not long before, around midnight, a performance of his “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” had wrapped at the Boulbon quarry, an outdoor venue 10 miles from the city. The mood there was calmer: Before the show, as festivalgoers debated the merits of various artists over drinks, it felt like a regular night out in Avignon.

And the intricate structure of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” invites a different kind of audience attention. Written by Rodrigues himself for the Paris-based Comédie-Française troupe, it weaves together two stories. The first is Euripides’ “Hecuba,” a rarely seen ancient Greek tragedy, whose central character seeks revenge after the death of her son. The second centers on a fictional actress, Nadia Roger, whose autistic son has been mistreated at a state-funded home for disabled minors (a story inspired by real events that took place in Switzerland, according to Rodrigues).

Nadia turns to the legal system for justice as she prepares to play Hecuba onstage — and slowly but surely, Rodrigues blurs the lines between the two characters. In the role, Elsa Lepoivre, a Comédie-Française stalwart, is phenomenal as she shifts between the two women’s subtly different ways of grieving, her facial expressions flickering back and forth.

Rodrigues is skilled at setting up multifaceted characters in a few quick strokes, and the rest of the Comédie-Française cast is playfully introduced in the opening scene, a table read of “Hecuba.” Loïc Corbery pokes fun at the process as the intense actor who immediately goes all out; Denis Podalydès, one of the troupe’s best-known members, leans effectively into his increasingly cantankerous onstage persona, complaining that “Euripides deserved better.”

The rest of the seven-strong cast often act as a Greek chorus, moving from their role in “Hecuba” to commenting on Nadia’s increasingly precarious mental state. Podalydès doubles as an initially taciturn state prosecutor who takes up Nadia’s case against the institution where her son, Otis, was kicked and threatened by staff members, along with other disabled children.

Like Hecuba, who ultimately takes matters into her own hands by attacking her son’s murderer, Nadia grapples throughout with what justice means. If the institution was chronically underfunded and understaffed, does responsibility lie with the employees who mistreated children, or with the state?

Some parts of “Hecuba, Not Hecuba” are convoluted by Rodrigues’s standards. He spins a story out of Otis’s favorite animated series, starring a dog, to set up Nadia’s “barking” — as she puts it — against the system. In some mythological tales, Hecuba is also turned into a dog, and a large canine statue is the only real element of décor in the Boulbon quarry, which felt too vast for the production. (In one funny aside, Corbéry, as one of the “Hecuba” actors, rightly quips about the set: “We don’t know what it’s for, but it’s impressive.”)

Yet as often in his theater work, Rodrigues expertly steers the audience toward empathy: for Nadia and Otis, but also for more complicated characters. At one point, underpaid, marginalized caregivers plead with the prosecutor to understand the working conditions that led to abuse.

The tone may be very different from Rodrigues’s impromptu night of performances against the far right, but his core beliefs are evident either way. What will “resistance” mean if the far-right party wins big in France on Sunday? Time will tell, but both Rodrigues the leader and Rodrigues the storyteller clearly have plenty of fight left in them.