Abstract
The partnership between the Avignon Festival and the Avignon-Le Pontet men’s prison was launched in 2004 on the initiative of Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, then co-directors of the Festival. Initially, the focus was on spectatorship: readings and extracts from productions were performed in prison during the festival. The project evolved in 2007 to allow inmates to leave their cells to attend shows, mixing with the festival-goers. The partnership took a new step forward when Olivier Py, a distinguished writer, actor, theatre and opera director, was appointed to lead the festival in 2013. As the first theatre professional at its head since Jean Vilar, who founded it in 1947 and directed it until his death in 1971, Py shifted the focus to theatre practice. The trigger came from an inmate, who challenged Py after his presentation of the 2014 festival programme at Le Pontet Prison: ‘Why don’t you come here and do theatre with us?’ Assisted by Enzo Verdet, Py set up a bi-weekly workshop behind bars for a group of volunteers who put on a play, perform it in prison and outside, in one of the festival venues. In the programme of Macbeth Philosophe, Py insists that the project does not qualify as social but artistic. It certainly is political as it implements the festival’s policy of accessibility of culture for all. The 2017 programme of Hamlet thus reads: ‘Performed by inmates, this intense version of Shakespeare’s tragedy frees its actors of all prejudices and reminds us of the project of popular theatre supported by the festival: to create bonds’. Py’s choice of plays from a repertoire of citizen drama is in itself eminently political in the way it alternates classical and Shakespearean tragedies. After Prométhée enchaîné [Prometheus Unbound] (2015), Hamlet (2016 and 2017), Sophocles’ Antigone (2018), and Macbeth Philosophe (2019), Py is currently rehearsing Othello astrologue [Othello, the Astrologer] for the 2020 edition of the festival.
Py makes a point of personally translating the Shakespeare plays he stages. He thus provided a French version of Romeo and Juliet (2011), King Lear (2015), and adapted successively Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello for Le Pontet’s inmates. In the case of Macbeth, he compressed the already dense source text, cutting what he called ‘decorative scenes’, such as the porter’s scene and the old man’s narration of the night storm, to foreground the tension between fate and responsibility, and the dramatisation of introspection and guilt. Macbeth’s capacity for introspection, which makes him a seer, a poet, and a choric character commenting upon his own tragic downfall, is enhanced by the title of the adaptation. Py opted for informal blank verse of roughly twelve syllables amid which, time and again, an alexandrine stood out. This choice of metrics was meant to provide a poetic dimension as well as a sense of efficacy to his text, in order to convey the angst at the core of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Unlike the source text, the witches were given no specific verse pattern.
Starring eight inmates (Christian, Mahfoud, Mohamed, Mourad, Olivier, Redwane, Samir, and Youssef), the production premiered at Le Pontet Prison on 10 July, and was then performed five times in the Banqueting Hall at the Chartreuse of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, which was transformed into a theatre venue in 1979, shortly after the monastery became a National Centre for Dramatic Writing. Py and Verdet opted for a bi-frontal arrangement that ensured proximity with the audience. As the longer sides of the rectangular hall were lined by four rows of chairs, the spectators were given the impression they were invited to share in a banquet – an impression which was reinforced at the core of the play, when the Macbeths ‘h[e]ld a solemn supper’ for their guests. At each of the shorter ends of the acting area stood a long, very narrow platform, accessible by a few central and lateral steps. There, at the borderline of the stage, transgressive actions took place, Hecate and the witches recurrently appeared from the underworld, Macbeth murdered King Duncan and usurped his crown. In the centre, a raised, circular platform suggested another table or a stage upon the stage. It hosted Macbeth’s monologues and visions, his duos and duels with Lady Macbeth, her trance after reading his letter at the end of act one and her fit of madness at the denouement, as well as his final confrontation with Macduff and death. Eager to render the sense of urgency prevailing in the tragedy, the actors moved swiftly from one platform to another. The interaction between the three white platforms also enhanced the relationship between acting and viewing, staging some characters as spectators within the play, which led to question the position and function of the audience without. When Macbeth frantically stabbed Duncan at one end of the stage – a murder that takes place offstage in the source text – Lady Macbeth watched him from the central platform and her tense, fascinated look vied with the action itself, almost to the extent of becoming the main focus of attention as the silent pressure it exerted on the novice murderer contaminated the uneasy audience, placing them in the position of witnesses, voyeurs, accomplices, and/or judges. Banquo’s apparition on a lateral platform allowed for embedded looks as he was stared at in horror by Macbeth standing in the centre, himself watched by Lady Macbeth from the other side platform, all of them encompassed by the spectator’s comprehensive gaze. A choric character, Lady Macbeth commented upon the scene for the guests at the banquet – here embodied by the audience. Through the mediation of looks, spectators were directly involved in the dialectic of fate and responsibility that runs through the play as, for instance, when Macbeth placed the crown on his head while being ironically spied on by Hecate from across the stage. The spectator was thus forced to renounce all claim to a comfortable, neutral position in the auditorium.
The choice of a bare stage reinforced the audience’s active participation in the performance through their imagination. The only technical effect was the smoke that came from under the round, central platform to signal irrational, supernatural manifestations. Interestingly, the smoke surrounded not the objects of the visions but the subjects to whom they appeared: Macbeth and Banquo when they saw the witches, Macbeth facing a poniard or confronting Banquo’s ghost, Lady Macbeth in her mad fit. This strategy questioned the very nature of the characters’ perception: was it reliable or were they the victims of illusions? Jarring notes on a piano participated in picturing the supernatural and macabre atmosphere as they introduced the witches and Banquo’s apparition, or tolled for the deaths of Duncan and Lady Macbeth. A drop cloth was hung at the back of each end platform, picturing contemporary cityscapes in black and white, perhaps suggesting a link between past and present notions of citizenship and power, and their subversion. Even though ‘fair and foul’ occurs only once in Py’s adaptation of the source text (translated as ‘l’ignoble et le beau’, which foregrounds aesthetic and moral readings), the stage arrangement and costumes were constant reminders of the leitmotiv’s circular pattern of complementary opposites. The white platforms stood out on the black stage, paced up and down by actors dressed in black and white.
Apart from a white chair figuring a throne, the only two other props, the paper crown worn successively by Duncan, Macbeth, and Malcolm, and a silver sphere handled by Hecate, provided more variations upon the motif of the circle running through the text and already materialised by the circularity of the central platform. The miniature globe, an oblique reference to Shakespeare’s theatre, contributed to Hecate’s self-designation not only as ‘the black moon’ in Py’s adaptation but as an illusionist (‘I am this wide theatre’). A kingly attribute (‘some (kings) carry a globe’), it also referred to her self-proclaimed power to make and unmake kings. On one of the backdrops, an arch framed a dome in the background – another ironic marker of both power and illusion. Gestic language contributed to densifying this network of circular motifs: while the witches addressed Macbeth standing on the round platform, he started whirling around, shaping his arms into a crown above his head.
The bareness of the stage enhanced the actors’ work, placing them at the core of the production. Although the porter’s scene was deleted, another moment of comic relief was provided by Macbeth, on a proposal made by the actor during a rehearsal. When the murderers Macbeth commissioned to execute Banquo and his son returned during the banquet and confessed to Fleance’s escape, Macbeth took a few dancing steps, knelt down by the central platform, popping out his face to thumb his nose at them, as if scoffing at fate, then scrambled onto the platform where he walked on all fours before standing up to vent his fear. No blood was spilt onstage but gestic language worked as a powerful incentive for the spectator’s imagination. When, after quietly reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Macbeth unrelentingly stabbed Duncan in his sleep, the actor seated on a chair with closed eyes simply bowed his head, his slow, dignified movement contrasting with his murderer’s display of frantic madness. As in Elizabethan times, the all-male cast was no hindrance to the credibility of the performance. Hecate and the witches looked androgynous in black trousers, wearing respectively a mask and veils covering their heads and busts. Even when Lady Macbeth in her mad fit revealed underneath her ample, majestic cloak a bare-chested, muscular actor – who had played Ismene in Antigone the year before – it only reminded the audience of her wish to be ‘unsex[ed]’ at the beginning of the play.
At the denouement, a hard-pressed Macbeth harangued his enemies, turning to the audience: ‘you band of traitors! Come and betray me’. Certainly, there was no betrayal of Shakespeare’s great dark tragedy in this powerful performance by the inmates of Le Pontet Prison.