Wesley Doucette

Phaedra is a difficult tragedy to stage with a straight face. Given the stakes, her desire for her stepson Hippolytus can easily tip into the absurd. This is not a youthful Romeo and Juliet infatuation.

The three previous productions I attended at Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi achieved what felt like a contradiction in terms: blackbox maximalism. Imagine my surprise, then, when I entered their space for Kâtip Bartleby, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and found a concentrated, stripped-down staging.

There is a presumption that advocacy theatre is aesthetically disinterested. I won’t deny recognizing its reflexes, polemical, sanctimonious, self-satisfied, but these reflexes are just that, reflexes.

Few neighborhoods possess the historical layering of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu. It has existed as a heterotopic space within the Eastern Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish Republic. Cosmopolitan by nature, it has long been home to Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Turks.

Make Portugal Great Again! In their production of Saloz’un Mavalı, adapted for Turkish stages by Can Yücel, Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi stages the clash between an imagined glorious past and a bleak, oppressive present. First performed in English as The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey in 1965, the play has, unfortunately, lost none of its relevance. Originally a two-act work, the CAS production condenses the material into just under an hour, but the ensemble fills that hour with a tightly woven collage of images, rhythms, and political critique.

For his interpretation of Ebenezer Scrooge in 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol, actor Michael Caine told director Brian Henson, “I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The performances of this year’s Festival d’Avignon trended towards the intimate and the documentarian. With videos and testimonies, projects aimed to establish a personal connection with real world subjects.

Currently onstage at the Festival d’Avignon’s restored Opéra Grand Avignon is, much to my astonishment, an opera. Les Incrédules, directed by Samuel Achache, with compositions by Florent Hubert and Antonin-Tri Hoang and a libretto by Achache and Sarah Le Picard, is a surreal meditation on miracles.

This protest forms the foundation of childhood life. And they’re right. People under the age of 18 endure indignities that would push most adults to their limits. But what happens when we move from “not fair” to injustice?

Through music, dance, and storytelling in the Festival d’Avignon’s beautiful Cloître des Célestins, a company of performers brings to life the story of a family. Draped in Eloé Level’s warm sepia lighting and shaded by the Cloître’s two trees, the ensemble transports us to the nostalgic, fractured memories of a childhood marked by exile, community, and the looming shadow of one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies: the Rwandan Genocide. Adapted from Gaël Faye’s novel, Gahugu Gato (Little Country) offers a gentle telling of a harrowing history.

A two-person epistolary drama between a father and daughter - On the surface, this sounds like the kind of conventional, writer-driven theatre that the Festival d’Avignon seeks to disrupt. Yet, coming from the mind of Tiago Rodrigues, La Distance becomes a conduit for deeper reflections on memory, family, and the social questions that linger in their wake.

I should perhaps begin with a confession: I don’t know the work of Jacques Brel. In continental Europe, this borders on impossibility, akin to not knowing Elvis in America.

Since its founding in 1947, only a handful of performances at the Festival d’Avignon have achieved mythic status. These productions offer their audiences bragging rights for life as  “you had to be there” events.

Les Amazones d’Avignon, a local feminist collective, distributed flyers to audience members entering the Cloître des Carmes for Milo Rau’s Le Procès Pelicot. Their protest was not just against their exclusion from the project, but also against the broader marginalization of militant feminists from public discourse.

From 2023 to 2026, Festival d’Avignon artistic director Tiago Rodrigues has invited director Gwenaël Morin to stage an annual production under the banner Démonter Les Remparts Pour Finir Le Pont / Dismantle the Walls to Finish the Bridge.

Tragedy doesn’t hinge on a twist but on a reversal or, as the Greeks termed it, a peripeteia. At the start of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, the characters have already endured a series of such reversals. The play is structured less as a tragedy than as its postmortem. What happens after the cataclysm?

Duri Bischoff’s set for Christoph Marthaler’s Le Sommet, now playing at the Festival d’Avignon’s FabricA theatre, presents a photorealistic cross-section of a chalet. Illuminated by cool fluorescent light, the interior is constructed from natural, practical materials. Rising incongruously from the center of the chalet is a large stone wave. Upstage center, a dumbwaiter dings.

The impulse with Avignon’s Cour d’Honneur is to go big. Since the Festival’s inception in 1947, artists have attempted to match the scale of the 30-meter wall behind them. It’s a gamble, but when it works, it’s mesmerizing. For her concert reEncanto, singer Mayra Andrade instead tamed the Cour d’Honneur into an intimate space.

Mette Ingvartsen’s Delirious Night, now in performance at the Festival d’Avignon’s Cour du Lycée St. Joseph, tries historical moments of frenzy, like medieval carnivals, on for size. The cast enters in mostly casual attire and masks. A performer then begins to clap a rhythm. This rhythm is gradually taken up by the other dancers, who fill the center of the cour with a run and kick.

Choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi appear only on screen in Laaroussa Quartet, now in performance at the Festival d’Avignon’s La Fabrica. Seated outdoors in Tunisia, the camera lingers on their gestures, offering only fleeting glimpses of their faces as they occasionally enter the frame.