REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents LES INCRÉDULES By Samuel Achache

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. A full fifty-two-piece orchestra undergirds the project’s immense ambition. Musically, the work belongs in the company of other landmark musical offerings previously featured at the Festival d’Avignon. But dramatically, its disjointed surrealism ultimately drains the piece of its hard-earned momentum.

The opera begins simply enough: a daughter enters a room and learns of her mother’s death. Moments later, the mother appears, young, radiant, and dressed in a resplendent gold gown. Pauline Kieffer’s costume design injects a dose of opulence into Lisa Navarro’s stark, looming walls of stained concrete. The roles of mother and daughter are doubled, enabling duets where dialogue and song intermingle. We learn that their relationship was strained and ended in distance. Disbelieving in her own death, the mother calls the swimming pool where she drowned, and is gradually informed of what occurred. This scene, with its doubling and pacing, reads as the best of Sartre mixed with the best of contemporary opera.

Grief-stricken, the daughter approaches a colleague who agrees to perform an autopsy. A small bone is discovered lodged in the mother’s heart. The mother recalls the sensation of sinking. The daughter consults a doctor to date the bone, and as they count to 180, joined by a chorus from the theater’s boxes, she falls for the doctor in a Fleabag-style reverie. When the test concludes, the doctor reels in disbelief: the bone predates modernity, belonging to the Pre-Columbian era. Hubert and Hoang's John Adams-inspired composition elevates the romance, admiration, and existential mourning of the daughter.

The plot then shifts to a church. The mother and daughter are nowhere to be found. Instead, a priest petitions for guidance following a possible miracle: Christ's face has begun to form in the leaking wall. His superior, unimpressed, rebukes him. Why here? Why now? Is this meant only to offer false hope to the faithful? Suddenly, a monk from the choir stands and strips. It’s the mother, pregnant with her daughter. She cries out to her daughter not to emerge, admitting she cannot love her. The daughter from the previous scene enters, witnessing her own birth. The mother's double then opens a secret door in the wall, unleashing a cascade of dirt upon which she lies.

Les Incrédules abounds in striking images and commanding performances. The cast navigates the shifting surrealism with uncanny skill, at once quotidian and operatic. There are no cheap winks or ironic gestures often used to make opera “accessible,” only true wit. The libretto is bold and often beautiful. There is no question that Les Incrédules belongs at Avignon’s theatre festival rather than Aix’s opera counterpart.

Yet the piece commits more deeply to its theme than to the audience’s dramatic investment. Just as the mother-daughter narrative begins to gather force, we are whisked away to the church for a (seemingly) unconnected episode. Intellectually, I admire the risk. Emotionally, the shift felt depleting. Still, the piece's rich materials, musical sophistication, and refined performances bring a high-gloss polish often absent from theatre festivals. I hope to revisit Les Incrédules in the future.

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