Summer Festival Hopping
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE Summer Festival Hopping By Janice Valls-Russell AIX-en-Provence Like Stratford-on-Avon in Britain, the French cities of Avignon and Aix-en-Provence are quiet places...
...When the Queen of Night appeared, the plain stage became a star-studded midnight blue surface that stunningly mirrored the stars overhead...
...The cast remains in residence during rehearsals and the actual season, before going on tour...
...Opera, he says, needs to be shaken out of its "rigidity...
...Four non-Shakespeare productions share slots at Stratford's two other theaters...
...Didier Bezace's subtle staging of Hristo Boytchev's Colonel Bird elevated to the level of a spiritual parable this play about inmates of a Bulgarian lunatic asylum who decide to join NATO...
...Aix offers elegant 17th- and 18th-century buildings and an aromatic cuisine pungent with basil, thyme and marjoram...
...In Giorgio Barberio Corsetti's La Tempesta, pastel colors, an upwardfloating stage and the presence of a violinist lightened the play's darker moments—rather too much so, perhaps...
...Sets and costumes are created locally, as at Stratford, where the RSC's 60-90 actors similarly live and work on the spot for nine months...
...Paulina (Hélène Le Corre), who is after all the daughter of both the sun and the night, came across as one of those delusively frail heroines, rather in the mold of Juliet, resolved to literally go through fire for love...
...The director, Stéphane Braunschweig, chose to transcend the libretto's misogyny, wherein darkness is female and negative, light male and positive...
...Her mother, Leda, was seduced by a swan (Hélène re-enacts this with a bolster, walking in a see-through garment round a jacuzzi with a swan-shaped rubber ring on her head...
...In the light opera, Hélène (Nora Gubisch) wonders why Venus has picked her family to "experiment" on...
...The RSC's director, Adrian Noble, will be in Aix next year, to stage Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses, with William Christie conducting, while Braunschweig will be directing Leos Janâcek's The Makropoulos Case, under Simon Rattle's baton...
...Now the ridiculed court drew laughs from the audience...
...Its repertoire usually consists of four major Shakespeare productions, performed at the large riverside Royal Shakespeare Theater...
...Every year, half a million people visit his birthplace and the cottage his wife Anne Hathaway grew up in...
...Whereas the cultural activities in Shakespeare's hometown are self-supporting, Aix and Avignon rely on the public finances that make up 35 per cent of the total budget for Aix, slightly more for Avignon...
...So was The Magic Flute, which played to full houses...
...Henry's queen, Catherine of Valois (Marie Vialle), came across as a spirited wench rather like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew...
...IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE Summer Festival Hopping By Janice Valls-Russell AIX-en-Provence Like Stratford-on-Avon in Britain, the French cities of Avignon and Aix-en-Provence are quiet places most of the year...
...Bernard Faivre d'Arcier, the festival's director, takes pride in the fact that about 40 per cent of the official program consists of foreign productions, performed as a French translation is projected overhead...
...They are laid by members of the municipal government, pupils from the grammar school and academics from around the world who parade through the town in gowns and traditional garb...
...The influence of Braunschweig's spare, luminous style could be felt at the Avignon Drama Festival...
...During the summer months each bursts into life, boasting, respectively, the Avignon Drama Festival, the Aix-en-Provence International Festival of Lyrical Art and the annual Stratford season of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC...
...Their historic city centers are roughly the same size as William Shakespeare's birthplace with its 20,000 inhabitants, and they have a similarly leisurely atmosphere...
...The three locales have other attractions, too...
...Atreat thisyearisBen Jonson's Volpone, performed with cynical abandon...
...Stratford-on-Avon's use of mass tourism to finance culture is a stimulating example, even if too idiosyncratic to be exported wholesale...
...He hopes to persuade other drama festivals in the European Union (EU) to co-finance Eastern European productions in 2000...
...The Center and the Institute work closely with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose Stratford season attracts tourists, theater lovers and drama students alike...
...His idea of a good opera is an artistic "symbiosis" between a conductor and a stage director...
...In Tim Supple's production of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid, a bare-bottomed Midas with asses' ears reminds the audience that metamorphosis can be grotesque...
...This was a double premiere, for JeanLouis Benoit's production and for the play itself, neverperformed in France because it was long considered anti-French...
...One significant difference between Stratford and the two French festivals is financial...
...Caliban was hardly more obnoxious than a drunken, illiterate peasant bent on peopling his island with piccoli Calibani ("baby Calibans...
...Every July, upwards of 100,000 visitors convene to choose among an official program of 50 productions...
...Cicadas in nearby trees chattered during the open air performances, staged in the courtyard of the Archbishop's Palace, in another smaller courtyard, and in the grounds of a country house on the city outskirts...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...She and Tamino (Christoph Genz) did this by stepping behind tall columns of video screens on which they were seen standing among flames...
...For her part, Hélène is expected to fall in love with a good-for-nothing shepherd called Paris (Alexandru Badea), a young lady-killer who munches apples to conceal his social unease...
...At the Aix-en-Provence opera festival in July La Belle Hélène, Offenbach's sendup of a classical tale, provided plenty of fun...
...A canny businessman himself, he was adept at turning entertainment into money, buying the best house in town, "New Place" (demolished by a later owner because the taxes were too high), and gathering tithes on large tracts of land...
...Peter Brook's staging of Mozart's Don Giovanni this year and last, with Daniel Harding conducting, was perfect in this respect...
...Its buildings house a records office, with historical material that includes documents signed by Shakespeare and relating to his activities as a local citizen...
...In his view, it is "an art form that has difficulty evolving...' To stimulate evolution, Lissner has set up a European Academy of Music in Aix that brings together talented young musicians and singers who are also competent actors...
...This year's program includes a powerful Othello, elegantly directed by Michael Attenborough...
...They consider that public investment in culture is part of the French way of doing things, while conceding that they are actively seeking ways of trying to lessen this dependence...
...In addition an unofficial festival has grown up that offers as many as 500 shows, often put on by amateurs who rent space at cafés or small theaters and hand out leaflets in the streets to promote themselves...
...Gulliver-like, King Harry (Philippe Torreton) marched across the landscape of a Lilliputian France, spread out on the stage...
...Entrance fees to the properties associated with the Bard and sales of teas and gadgets generate a steady flow of income for the Shakespeare Center, which offers courses, administers a library and promotes exhibitions and concerts...
...Shakespeare is a must at Avignon, but its offerings extend considerably beyond the Elizabethan...
...Stéphane Lissner, the director of the Aix festival, formerly ran the Châtelet Theater in Paris...
...France, I should hasten to note, does not slight the Bard: He is the country's most produced playwright...
...Not far from Shakespeare's grammar school, still in existence, stands the house of Katherine Rogers, whose son John Harvard went on to found a famous university...
...Rising over it is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, made famous the world over by Cezanne's paintings...
...Tens of thousands step into the house that belonged to his granddaughter or explore the farm where his mother Mary Arden lived...
...This year, Henry Fhad the star venue at the Papal palace courtyard...
...The Aix public, though, expects to be moved as well as amused...
...Both Lissner and Faivre d'Arcier, who were appointed to their posts by the Minister of Culture, deny that this limits their scope for action...
...The shows would originate in their home countries before going on an EU tour...
...Shakespeare, of course, constitutes Stratford's main industry, and the enigmatic smile on his bust in Trinity Church suggests that he approves...
...Stratford has its beautiful riverside and Tudor architecture...
...The sight of Iago (Richard McCabe) turning as he is led offstage to survey the emotional wreckage he has provoked raises the intensity of the production to an almost unbearable pitch...
...Stratford is also home to the prestigious Shakespeare Institute, a postgraduate and research center of the University of Birmingham...
...Overall, the staging conveyed all the play's subtleties, including its fascination with the world of theater itself...
...Actor-director Jean Vilar, who launched the festival in 1947 with Richard II, briefly toyed with the idea of an all-Shakespeare fiesta...
...Avignon was home to the Popes for much of the 14th century, and its fortifications, palace and churches form a rich architectural ensemble, while frescoes and a fine art collection recall the cultural sophistication of the Papal court...
...Earlier this year, Braunschweig directed a successful Merchant of Venice, staged in Paris and several other cities...
...In Trinity church each April 23 fresh birthday wreaths surround Shakespeare's tomb...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 9
