theater  | grande salle | running time 3 hr 10 mn including intermission |
thursday 5 january 2012 at 19 h
friday 6 january 2012 at 19 h

after Hamlet by William Shakespeare – Vincent Macaigne

Vincent Macaigne is a young director well-known on European stages for his authoritative style. His movements are dynamic, driven. Under his direction, the actors are pushed to the wall, forcing them to give their all. Absolute, radical, they push the envelope in roles they inhabit as if their lives depended on it. Macaigne loves the theatre with excess, with passion. His pieces, filled with images of a striking beauty, with hallucinatory visions, are always driven by necessity and choice. With Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre (At least I will leave behind a beautiful corpse), freely inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which premiered at the 2011 Avignon Festival, he presents a work propelled by anger. The anger of Hamlet who cannot accept the murder of his father, and the destiny which is now imposed upon him. It is also the anger of a generation, rebelling against authority, power and the telling of lies. Hamlet is a means to an end, the fiction allowing Macaigne to make this piece, on this stage, a megaphone for his own rage. His salutary approach will by definition shake up the bourgeois, stale, rancid theatre clinging to precepts and traditions from another time.

meet Vincent Macaigne after the performance
thursday 5 january 

www.festival-avignon.com

adaptation, direction, visual conception Vincent Macaigne / set design Benjamin Hautin, Vincent Macaigne, Julien Peissel / props Lucie Basclet / lighting Kelig Le Bars / sound Loïc Le Roux / assistant Marie Ben Bachir / technical Festival d’Avignon / set ateliers du Festival d’Avignon / with Samuel Achache, Laure Calamy, Jean-Charles Clichet, Julie Lesgages, Emmanuel Matte, Rodolphe Poulain, Pascal Rénéric, Sylvain Sounier

Production Festival d’Avignon. Coproduction Théâtre national de Chaillot, Paris / MC2: Grenoble / Centre dramatique national Orléans-Loiret-Centre / the Theatres of the city of Luxembourg / La Filature, Scène nationale – Mulhouse / Le Phénix, Scène nationale de Valenciennes / Cie Friche 22.66 / L’Hippodrome, Scène nationale de Douai. Also financed by the Île-de-France region. With support from the DRAC Île-de-France / l’Adami / La Spedidam. With artistic participation of the Jeune Théâtre National. Premiere July 2011.