Bringing the word back onto the stage

by Rosslyn Hyams

Article published on the 2008-07-11 Latest update 2008-07-11 12:39 TU

La cloître des Carmes
(Photo: Festival d'Avignon)

One of the big issues in the world of theatre today in Europe is “text or no text?”. Are movement and sound more important on stage than words? Are the words necessary or desirable? That’s a question still buzzing around at the international, multi-lingual, multi-discipline Avignon Festival in the South of France.

To speak or not to speak… William Shakespeare, master of dramatic speech would turn in his grave.   However, it’s a big question here at the Avignon Festival - one that started challenging directors and playwrights several years ago.

The Avignon Festival sets out to be a vanguard of stage trends, so it’s also here that, for a month and by way of about 40 productions, debates like these heat up. 

In 2006, for example, the festival placed the relationship with playwrights and stage directors centre stage.

Bucking the trend towards wordless scripts with an emphasis on gesture, dance, or sound and image, in theatrical productions, French director Arthur Nauzyciel is putting on a Danish play, Ordet (The Word).

Written in six days in 1922 by a 25-year-old priest, Kaj Munk, Ordet is a play about faith, which questions faith. It’s about God, about religious fanaticism, about life and about death.

Nauzyciel told RFI that he had to take a stand against the debate that began in 2005, which seemed to be reducing the importance of words on the Avignon stages.  He wanted to put on a play where the words are the focus, and he and the Festival directors agreed on Ordet. 

It’s performed in the meditative Carmelite Cloisters, Le Cloître des Carmes. Originally he had thought of the Pope’s Palace courtyard of honour, the Avignon Festival’s biggest venue.  But the historical and religious charge, he says would have crushed the audience rather than engage them.

After deciding upon the right environment for Ordet, Nauzyciel worked with his actors and decor so that theatre magic reinforces the words.  

The end of the play is strange and moving. The daughter-in-law, played by Catherine Vuillez, loses a newborn child and then dies herself. 

She’s laid out in a plexiglass coffin in the centre of the stage and then… miracle, she’s resurrected.  When the cast took their bow, she was in tears.

Ordet, The Word, written by later Danish writer Kaj Munk, and staged as a première by Arthur Nauzyciel  running until 15th July at the Avignon Festival.