ERIC VIGNER

PARCOURS

English Version

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Overview of the works: 1991 LA MAISON D’OS by ROLAND DUBILLARD Created in an ancient mattress factory of Issy-les-Moulineaux, January 25th and at the Defence Arch for the PARIS AUTUMN FESTIVAL, October 27th 1992 LE RÉGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE Based on the works of ALPHONSE ALLAIS, LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, JEAN GENET, ROLAND DUBILLARD, GEORGES COURTELINE and FRANZ MARC Created at the QUARTZ in Brest, March 25th 1993 LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ by MARGUERITE DURAS Created at the at the QUARTZ in the STELLA, ancient cinema of the Fifties nearby Brest, October 26th , National and International Tour in France and Russia 1993 LE SOIR DE L OBÉRIOU ELIZAVIETA BAM by DANIIL HARMS Created at the THÉÂTRE DU ROND-POINT, Champs-Élysées in Paris, November 29th Tour to Moskow, 1994 1994 LE JEUNE HOMME by JEAN AUDUREAU Created at the THÉÂTRE DE LA COMMUNE/AUBERVILLIERS, June 9th 1995 REVIENS À TOI (ENCORE)/LOOKING AT YOU (REVIVED) AGAIN by GREGORY MOTTON Created at the ODÉON-THÉÂTRE DE L'EUROPE - PARIS AUTUMN FESTIVAL, November 30th National Tour in France 1995 BAJAZET by JEAN RACINE Created at the COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE,THÉÂTRE DU VIEUX COLOMBIER, May 9th 1995 ÉRIC VIGNER is nominated to the direction of the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, Dramatic Center of Brittany 1996 L’ILLUSION COMIQUE by PIERRE CORNEILLE Opened the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, January 12th National Tour in France 1996 BRANCUSI CONTRE ÉTATS UNIS, UN PROCÈS HISTORIQUE - 1928 Adaptated for the stage by ÉRIC VIGNER Created for the 50th birthday of the AVIGNON FESTIVAL Presented at the CENTRE GEORGE POMPIDOU in Paris National Tour in France 1998 TOI COUR, MOI JARDIN by JACQUES REBOTIER Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, March 4th 1998 MARION DE LORME by VICTOR HUGO Adaptated by ÉRIC VIGNER Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, September 29th Presented at the THÉÂTRE DE LA VILLE in Paris, January 1999 National Tour in France

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1999 L ÉCOLE DES FEMMES by MOLIÈRE Created at the COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE, Salle Richelieu, September 27th Presented at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, June 2000 2000 RHINOCÉROS by EUGÈNE IONESCO Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, November 11th 2000 Opera LA DIDONE by CAVALLI Conductor: Christophe ROUSSET Created at the OPERA LAUSANNE, December 31st 2001 LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE based on the novel by HENRY JAMES French adaptation by MARGUERITE DURAS Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, October 17th National and International Tour Presented in 2002 at the ESPACE GO in Montreal Presented in 2004 at the EISENHOWER THEATER, KENNEDY CENTER in Washington 2002 SAVANNAH BAY by MARGUERITE DURAS. Created at the COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE, Salle Richelieu, September 14th National Tour in France Presented at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, October 2002 Presented at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, GRAND THÉÂTRE, February 2004 2002 Le CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT acquired a national status as NATIONAL DRAMATIC CENTER. and henceforth programs theatre in two venues, the CDDB and the newly constructed Grand Théâtre (architect HENRY GAUDIN, 1038 seats). 2003 Opera L’EMPIO PUNITO by ALESSANDRO MELANI Conductor: CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET Created at the OPERA OF LEIPZIG, May 30th 2003 “…OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES.” by ROLAND DUBILLARD. Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT (Grand Théâtre), October 7th National Tour in France Presented at the THÉÂTRE DU ROND-POINT in Paris, April 2004 2004 Opera ANTIGONA by TRAETTA Conductor: CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET Created at the OPERA OF MONTPELLIER, March 21st Presented at the THÉÂTRE DU CHATÊLET in Paris, June 22nd 2004 LE JEU DU KWI JOK or LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME Based on the comedy-ballet by MOLIÈRE and LULLY Adaptated by ÉRIC VIGNER Created at the NATIONAL THEATER OF COREA in Seoul, September 11th Presented at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT (Grand Théâtre), October 2004 French-Korean Cultural Prize 2004 Presented at the OPERA COMIQUE in Paris, September 2006 Presented at the QUARTZ in Brest, October 2006

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2006 PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA Based on LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ and HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR by MARGUERITE DURAS Adaptated by ÉRIC VIGNER Created for the Cloître des Carmes, AVIGNON FESTIVAL, July 11th Presented at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT (Grand Théâtre), May 2006 National Tour in France 2006 JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE by RÉMI DE VOS Created at the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT (Grand Théâtre), October 10th Presented at the THÉÂTRE DU ROND-POINT in Paris in January-February 2007 2007 LE BARBIER DE SÉVILLE or LA PRÉCAUTION INUTILE by BEAUMARCHAIS Created at the NATIONAL THEATER OF ALBANIA, Tirana, April 19th Tour in the Balkan countries, Prize of the International Theater Festival of Butrint 2007 SAVANNAH BAY by MARGUERITE DURAS Creation at the ESPACE GO, Montreal, Canada, September 4th 2007 DÉBRAYAGE by RÉMI DE VOS Creation at the La Manufacture, Haute École de Suisse romande and the CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT (Grand Théâtre), October 9th National Tour in France 2008 IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS by BÉRNARD-MARIE KOLTÈS Created at the 7 STAGES, Atlanta, USA, April 24th 2008 OTHELLO by SHAKESPEARE Adaptation & translation RÉMI DE VOS and ÉRIC VIGNER Creation at CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, October 6th Presented at the ODÉON NATIONAL THEATER, Paris National Tour in France 2009 SEXTETT by RÉMI DE VOS Creation at CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, October 5th Tour to Paris (THEATRE DU ROND-POINT), Reims, Orléans, Amiens, Montréal 2010 LE BARBIER DE SÉVILLE by BEAUMARCHAIS Created at the NATIONAL THEATER OF ALBANIA, Tirana, 19 April 2007 Presented at CDDB-THÉÂTRE DE LORIENT, April 2010 Tour to India, New Delhi, Chennai, 13th edition of India’s most important International Theater Festival, the BHARAT RANG MAHOTSAV, January 2011 2010 In October 2010, ÉRIC VIGNER founded his ACADEMY in order to work with the new generation over several years. The Academy follows the principles of a little democracy and assembles 7 young trilingual actors from 7 cultural backgrounds - Morocco, Romania, Mali, Belgium, South Korea, Germany, Israel - VLAD CHIRITA, LAHCEN ELMAZOUZI, EYE HAIDARA, HYUN JOO LEE, TOMMY MILLIOT, NICO ROGNER et ISAIE SULTAN. They work on classical as well as contemporary forms of writing and will present LA PLACE ROYALE by CORNEILLE in Lorient and on tour in France during the season 2011/2012.

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ERIC VIGNER - PARCOURS Université de Haute Bretagne - Secondary school teacher’s diploma - Visual Arts Conservatoire de Rennes - Theatre studies École de la rue blanche (E.N.S.A.T.T.) - National School of Theatre Art and Technology

Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris (C.N.S.A.D.) - Paris National Academy of Dramatic Art After ten years of study, Eric Vigner graduates from the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique of Paris in 1988, directing PIERRE CORNEILLE’s LA PLACE ROYALE with MICHEL BOMPOIL, DIDIER GALAS, PIERRE GÉRARD, MATHIAS MÉGARD, LUCE MOUCHEL, DENIS PODALYDÈS, PATRICIA VARNAY. He had studied all the arts and crafts of the theatre: visual artist, costume designer, scenographer, assistant director and actor, above all in ELVIRE JOUVET 40, directed by BRIGITTE JAQUES, together with PHILIPPE CLEVENOT and MARIA DE MEDEIROS. On stage, he plays in particular with JEAN-PIERRE MIQUEL and CHRISTIAN COLIN. In the cinema, he works with MARIA DE MEDEIROS, PHILIPPE DE BROCA, BENOÎT JACQUOT and others… This experience quite naturally leads him to stage directing as his chief activity.

“The driving force behind what I do in the theatre is neither ideological nor analytical: it is poetic, it addresses the unexplainable, grace, and is nurtured by ‘sentiment’ as conceived by Jouvet. Its aim is theatrical fact rather than theatrical discourse.” ERIC VIGNER (EV)

When Vigner founds the COMPAGNIE SUZANNE M. ERIC VIGNER in 1990, this is an act of poesy, carrying on tradition yet full of inventiveness. The name of the company, Suzanne M., recalls, as an intimately personal dedication, the forename and, in abbreviated form, the maiden-name of his grandmother:

“In memory of a woman who always did what she wanted, throughout her life. She was in fact the alter ego of Dubillard. When she died I felt lost, abandoned. Not much later followed the death of Antoine Vitez, whom I had known slightly (too slightly). Strangely enough, it was the coincidence of these losses that ultimately gave me the strength to do something to keep alive, I felt the need to work the way I wanted to work, without relying on any institution. What followed was a time of "opposition". You create theatre on the basis of what you are - your personal history - to make your pet phantoms come to life on stage.” EV

As his first production for COMPAGNIE SUZANNE M., Eric Vigner chooses LA MAISON D'OS by ROLAND DUBILLARD, in line with the statement in that play which asserts the complete freedom of the artist:

“It is better to say what you want than what you’re expected to say, or else I’ll keep quiet. The choice is yours.” ROLAND DUBILLARD, LA MAISON D’OS, Les Editions Gallimard 1966

This first play is to be the ‘manifesto’ of his artistic, aesthetic and moral determination to bring to life, here and now, a free theatre, a theatre free from ideological ways and byways, a far cry from the triumph of the pretences of a theatre bogged down by false compromises.

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Dubillard says that LA MAISON D'OS is a play about the renunciation of death, a play conceived like a real house - there is obviously no time dimension, since it is death we are confronted with - nothing but space destined to re-create the inner universe, the defeat of Man, nothing but ‘vertical’ space.

“The body is a house, any house is a sort of carcass, and inside there is an existence.” ROLAND DUBILLARD

LA MAISON D'OS was first staged in 1962, directed by Arlette Reinerg, at the Théâtre de Lutèce, a small theatre that has since been closed down, and it was not restaged until 1991, when Eric Vigner gets hold of it and embarks on the venture along with some twenty or so young actors (ODILE BOUGEARD, ÉLSA BOUCHAIN, BRUNO BOULZAGUET, CHRISTOPHE BRAULT, ARNAUD CHURIN, PHILIPPE COTTEN, MYRIAM COURCHELLE, BENOÎT DI MARCO, BENOÎT GIROS, XAVIER DE GUILLEBON, PAULINE HEMSI, PASCAL LACROIX, DENIS LÉGER-MILHAU, GAËL LESCOT, LAURENT LÉVY, FRANÇOIS MOREL, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS PERRIER, GUILLAUME RANNOU, ALICE VARENNE, KARINE VUILLERMOZ, CATHERINE VUILLEZ). By inviting subscriptions, he succeeds in putting on this play, the first with his company, in an unlikely setting - an abandoned factory in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where it opened on 25 January 1991.

“A narrow three-storied building: Dubillard’s ‘vertical space’. Actually, an ancient mattress factory; once you enter the ground floor with the stage, you can read - or rather, guess - words written on the wall with its peeling plaster: ‘hairs’, ‘feathers’… The first encounter with this place was extraordinary - a magic place, it met all that Dubillard had wished and dreamt of: his entire play relies on verticality, not horizontality. What I wanted was to make the audience part of the house. All too often, in the theatre, the audience is placed in front of things, outside the action. I wanted to make sure they were ‘in’ it, part of it - that’s what the play is all about. A crazy stage for an insane spectacle which, even though it does not take the spectator from the basement to the loft, will nevertheless ‘transport’ him (in the original sense of the term) from one level of the stage to another.” EV

Eric Vigner’s production of the play shows his outstanding skills as an illusionist and ‘handler’ of space, his ability to adapt and invent things to subserve a rare piece of writing about the ‘without’ and ‘within’ of buildings and human beings, the nostalgia of childhood, human and animal anguish, a veritable exploration of ‘the space within’, as Henri Michaux put it. LA MAISON D'OS is a considerable success and is re-staged, six months later, in the course of the Paris Autumn Festival 1991 in the depths of the Grande Arche de la Défense.

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“At Issy, the leprous walls and the winter cold turned Dubillard’s world into a narrow, closed-in-itself universe and conjured up a late 19th century end-of-the-world atmosphere. At La Défense, where all is clean and open, the end of the world is the end of our century. Where there were stones at Issy there is water at La Défense. The Maison d’Os is Noah’s Ark. The spectators are slightly askew, as on a sinking ship that lists as it goes down. It’s all a matter of space.” EV

The spectators travel in the building as if it were a body. The play starts on the ground floor, then moves up to the upper stories and ends in the loft, the body’s head.

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“During rehearsals in that icy-cold factory we were all the time listening to the radio, closely following the events of the Gulf War. In this way, in that universe of stone and bitter cold, the war assumed phantasmagoric proportions. It was then and there that I came to think of our next play, as a sort of follow-up: LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE. What does war mean to us, to me as a person? To me, who has never seen combat, never been directly exposed to that reality. So I invented a plot for seven actors in a town in ruins somewhere in the world, where war has raged for years. The actors meet clandestinely in an abandoned theatre, a theatre that no longer exists, in a no-go area, and turn theatre into an act of resistance against reality.” EV

“There is a relationship between theater and death; between theater and war, between the theatrical work and the military work. In theater, there is danger of imaginary death. In the war, there is danger of real death. The theater is in the situation of a company, a division which has to rise to the assault of a citadel and which has no means to gain a victory. It is necessary to have appeal to invention.” ANTOINE VITEZ

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LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is a compilation of fragments taken from literary and poetical texts by ALPHONSE ALLAIS, LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, JEAN GENET, ROLAND DUBILLARD, GEORGES COURTELINE and FRANZ MARC, reflecting their experience of military life and the war. Eric Vigner turns classic dramaturgical concepts upside down, bursts linearity wide open; there is no beginning, no middle part, no end. He jumps back and forth in time and across the whole array of authors. Among these texts there are three letters by Franz Marc - a painter and volunteer soldier. letters to his wife, written from Verdun. But what he speaks of is his art, not the war. He speaks of the spiritual aspects of art. Together with Kandinsky, Marc had founded the ‘Blauer Reiter’, and he was friends with Paul Klee. Now, at the age of 30, he has painted for little more than three years, but has already passed through all the new styles of painting of his time (Cubism, Fauvism…) and is slowly moving towards abstraction. He is the originator of arbitrary - subjective - colour, less representative of nature but so much more expressive: Arbitrary colour is used by these painters to conjure up a frame of mind, emotions, another kind of nature - that of an inner world. Right there, in the turmoil of warfare, he writes to his wife: ‘Behind the war, behind the reality of fighting, of battle, there is something else, some aspect of the order of the world, of harmony’. It is this intuition that he wants to express in his paintings, but he cannot do so because a war is going on around him.

“We are already on the ‘other side’ - on the side of non-vanity, of the non-application of our knowledge. Our knowledge and skills are within us, mute, the noble man does not talk about the technicalities of our existence. There’s only one thing that must be done: Art must be freed from its mask. In our day and age, the purpose of Art is no longer to serve people for their big or small pretences. Art is - or is bound to be - metaphysical, and it is only now that it can be metaphysical. Art is going to liberate itself from human objectives and purposes. We will no longer paint a forest, or a horse, as we like them or as they appear to us but as they are in reality, the way the forest or the horse experience themselves, their absolute nature behind appearances, behind what we see… From now on, we have to unlearn relating animals or plants to ourselves and presenting our relation with them in our works. All things on earth have their very own forms, their formula which our fumbling hands cannot feel but which we grasp intuitively to the extent our talent permits. We will but know in part as long as our earthbound existence lasts - but don’t we all believe in metamorphosis? We artists, all of us: why, otherwise, this eternal search for metamorphic forms? The things as they really are, beyond what they seem to be?

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Things speak: there is a will in them, and form. Why should we interfere? There is no wisdom we can impart to them… We stand, I believe, at the divide between two long epochs, but as yet the land lies waste with fragments of old ideas and forms that refuse to go away although they are of the past. These old ideas and creations live on, persist in a sham existence, and we helplessly face the Herculean task to drive them out and make room for the New which is already waiting to replace them. Appearances are trite and plain - cast them off, remove them completely from your thoughts - think yourselves, and your way of looking at the world, free from these appearances: what remains is the world, eternally moving, in its true form, a form of which we, the artists, are capable of catching a glimpse.” FRANZ MARC

“Franz Marc confronted the issue of a new form of presenting things. I believe that we are today very close to that period. We have to construct, to go out in quest of the future. I find it very difficult today to create a coherent œuvre in a classic structure. Things don’t work like that in our day and age. What we see is only parts, fragments, I would say, and it is out of the confrontation of these fragments, out of the tension between them, that something like a new world - I can’t say what sort of world - will perhaps be born.” EV

LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is staged at the Quartz Theatre at Brest on 25 March 1992, with seven actors of the COMPAGNIE SUZANNE M., BRUNO BOULZAGUET, ARNAUD CHURIN, PHILIPPE COTTEN, BENOÎT DI MARCO, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, DOMINIQUE PARENT and GUILLAUME RANNOU.

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This time the whole theatre is the stage. Eric Vigner is in search of the appropriate forms and remodels space so as to cast light on the vertical linkages. With the nervous titter of those about to die, a forlorn hope indulges in one last ‘great illusion’.

“I should like to be like these boys. Like them, I love secrecy. I see myself as a painter who has worked in solitude for months, away from curious glances, and who now unveils his canvas - going through a moment of suffering.” EV

LE REGIMENT DE SAMBRE ET MEUSE is presented at the Centre Dramatique National d'Aubervilliers. Eric Vigner then works with ANATOLI VASSILIEV in Moscow, with YOSHI OÏDA (Académie Expérimentale des Théâtres) and LUCA RONCONI. In 1993 he is invited by PETER BROOK to a research work on stage direction. He is regarded as one of the most innovative stage directors of his generation.

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In 1993 he also holds a masterclass on MARGUERITE DURAS, at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD), for final-year drama students, the choice of the play is based on Ernesto’s statement in LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ (SUMMER RAIN):

“I’m not going back to school because at school they teach me things I don’t know.” MARGUERITE DURAS, LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ

This masterclass is a further turning point in Vigner’s life. MARGUERITE DURAS comes to see the performance at the CNSAD Theatre.

“There she is, for the first time, watching a performance of the stage version of her novel ‘La pluie d'été‘ staged by another person - Eric Vigner. She sits there, immobile, her eyes fixed on the scene, seeing only what is happening on stage. She hears the words, phrases, people she knows because she has created, invented them. Sometimes she discovers something new, is astounded. She smiles when there is silence - a silence implied in her writing and reproduced in the interpretation of her text: ‘gentleness - he remembers - silence - he is thinking - His parents watch him as he reflects (silence) - time’ She orchestrates her emotion embodied in the score that comes to life before her eyes. Her forefinger moves, approving, stops, stays immobile in the air, waiting for what is to happen on stage. Perhaps writing is the unreasonable attempt to instil the infinite into the mortality of life. To transfer into space what has been written, then, is the even more unreasonable attempt to make it perceptible in the here and now. From passage to passage, we witness a string of memories which take shape and expand in the poetic space of the production: two characters, two opposites fuse to express their God, their Devil in one and the same word. What strings them together may be a burnt book which comes up again and again in the course of the story. The story of a Jewish king, which Ernesto read at an age when he couldn’t even read. Knowledge before one knows. Things one just knows. Forgotten. Inherited. Something important is said about the awareness of knowledge and ignorance. About the awareness of the Holocaust. About all the kings of Israel, gassed and consumed by flames. About a world that has killed itself. About humankind that has sacrificed, that is to say, sanctified itself. All this is said, and shown, lightly, with a lightness in the sense of suppleness, taking the heaviness off the lamentation. ‘This is no longer the time for lamentation, for getting annoyed behind the scenes. These times are gone.

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Lamenting has become useless and undignified’. The question now, the question that we are confronted with, is how to behave in future, how to deal with the future.

Mother: Chemistry is the future, isn’t it? Ernesto : No. Mother : No. (pause) What is the future ? Ernesto : Tomorrow.

No judgment, nor a lesson in dramaturgy. Just the state of innocence before discourse, before any certainties expressed in words. Nothing is explained. Nothing is explicable. And, after all, ‘it doesn’t matter’.

I, son of David, king of Jerusalem, lost hope, I grieved over all I had hoped for. Evil. Doubt. Uncertainty, and the certainty that went before it. Plagues. I grieved over plagues.

The barren search for God. Hunger. Poverty and hunger. Wars. I grieved over wars. The ceremonial of life. All the mistakes. I grieved over the lying and evil and doubt. Poems and songs. I grieved over silence. Lust too. And murder… Love, he grieved for… And one day, he didn’t grieve. Didn’t grieve over anything any more.

The performance ends with the stage ablaze. With the mystery of the burnt book, the book turned to ashes. She rises, deeply moved. She says, ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps theatre is more powerful than prose. ” BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER (May1994)

Marguerite Duras, Eric Vigner and his sister Bénédicte 1993

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Eric Vigner’s finalised stage version of LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ with HÉLÈNE BABU, MARILÙ BISCIGLIA, ANNE COESENS, THIERRY COLLET, PHILIPPE MÉTRO, JEAN-BAPTISTE SASTRE is presented by the Quartz Theatre at the Stella - an old cinema dating from the fifties at Lambézellec in the environs of Brest - on 25 November 1993 in the presence of MARGUERITE DURAS. Over the next two years, the play goes on tour through France and Russia. It is the beginning of a great friendship between the author and the young director.

Vigner focuses on the character of Marguerite Duras’ Ernesto, a son of immigrants living at Vitry. Already present in ‘Les Enfants’, a film made by Duras in 1984, he is also a character in ‘La pluie d'été’, a story published in 1990. Fragile and unearthly, Ernesto - between his 12th and 20th year - treasures two objects sacred to him: a scorched book and a mythical tree. He refuses to go to school…“because at school they teach me things I don’t know”. A scorched book makes him realise that he can read:

“Ever since entering into the kind of light that issues from the book… it’s been like living in a state of wonder… (Ernesto smiles). I’m sorry… it’s hard to express… Words don’t change their shape, they change their meaning, their function… They don’t have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don’t know, that you’ve never read or heard… you’ve never seen their shape, but you feel… you suspect… they correspond to… an empty space inside you… or in the universe… I don’t know…” MARGUERITE DURAS, LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ

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“I hope to be able to get out of the house this winter and do theatre. Theatre that’s read, not acted. Acting doesn’t bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it - lessens its immediacy and depth, weakens its muscles and dilutes its blood. That’s what I think today. But I think it often. Deep down, that’s how I really see the theatre.” MARGUERITE DURAS, LA VIE MATERIELLE

“I discovered ‘La pluie d'été’ at the Théâtre du Conservatoire. Young student actors were playing and reading the book by Marguerite Duras. An immigrant boy refuses to go to school any longer, telling us under the starry sky how right he was! Then the book falls open - we see the boy’s father and mother, his neighbourhood friends, his teacher, a journalist … and … a serious but funny story turns great drama. Afterwards, I met the director of the play, for the first time. Let me tell you about this first encounter. Eric Vigner loves text. He has an absolute (physical) sense of space. This is exactly what I expect from theatre. This is something I simply don’t want to miss. (…) How does he do it, this Eric Vigner? I don’t know. But I know that this young man can make his actors do anything he wants. For he has the alertness of a wild animal and the eyes of a poet.” JEAN AUDUREAU (04/07/93)

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In LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ, the book that the actors are partly to read and partly to act out, Marguerite Duras depicts Vitry - ’the least literary place one can find’ - as a dreamy dream of a suburb. A place where, in describing a family unconstrained by social convention, the author can play on words as one would jump from stone to stone when crossing a stream, talking about life and time, school, God, journeys and storms. Eric Vigner, closely following the thread of the story, brings to life what Marguerite Duras has created: feelings.

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“It is this injury, which hurts the souls and leaves the bodies intact, that sets the stage literally ablaze at the end of the play, a curtain of flames illuminates the players taking their bows before the fire fighter’s extinguisher takes everyone - actors and audience alike - back into the night of Brest which, this evening, is engulfed by the darkness of the ocean.” HERVÉ GAUVILLE (LIBÉRATION, 9 November 1993)

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Destruction of the city of Lorient and ist theatre at the end of the second world war

LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ is touring Russia, when Eric Vigner is invited by the Minister of Culture to take charge of the Centre Dramatique de Bretagne in Lorient. The city has a glorious past and suffered greatly in more recent times. Lorient was founded 1666 under the reign of Louis XIV, as the french seat of the East India Company. In 1942 it was almost completely destroyed by bombs, seating the most important German submarine base of the Atlantic wall. The city also was severely hit by the economic crisis of the ‘eighties’, and is looking for a better future. Eric Vigner’s art project as head of its theatre is directed towards the future of dramatic art: his quest is to discover and give guidance to new creative talents and to forge links with the region and its people. He is appointed director of the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient, Centre Dramatique de Bretagne, on 1 August 1995. The theatre opens in January 1996, after several months of renovation. Before going to Lorient, he undertakes a number of projects in the period 1993 - 1995 : ! LE SOIR DE L'OBERIOU - ELIZAVIÉTA BAM, a masterclass with the actors of LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ for the Académie Expérimentale des Théâtres, on an unpublished text by DANIIL HARMS, a Russian avant-garde writer of the 1930s. The project is staged at the Théâtre du Rond-Point à Paris, then at the Studio-CRDC de Nantes and also at ANATOLI VASSILIEV’s theatre in Moscow.

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! C'EST BEAU by NATHALIE SARRAULT, a masterclass at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, on the occasion of which he met NATHALIE SARRAUTE. ! LE JEUNE HOMME by JEAN AUDUREAU, production on 9 June 1994 at the Centre Dramatique National in Aubervilliers with ODILE BOUGEARD, ALAIN LIBOLT, GILBERT MARCANTOGNINI, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, FRÉDÉRIC NAUZYCIEL, CHRISTOPHE RATANDRA, MICHELLE SIGAL, MARTINE THINIÈRES, JACQUES VERZIER, CATHERINE VUILLEZ. ! REVIENS À TOI (ENCORE) - [Looking at you (revived) again] by GREGORY MOTTON with MARILÙ MARINI, BRUNO RAFFAËLLI, ALICE VARENNE, PATRICK MOLARD (CORNEMUSE), production on 4 October 1994 at the Scène Nationale d'Albi, followed by performances at the Théâtre National de l'Odéon on the occasion of the Paris Autumn Festival 1995.

“You have to stop knowing in order to come to grips with Motton, to take the plunge with him, to make a clean sweep of his little tricks and to seek purity and the hard truth, his poetic touch; to go ahead without aiming at any sort of style; ‘to invent truth.’” EV

“My work has always been intimately linked with the reality of the location, with its own magic, trying to go the roundabout way, playing on the time-lag, the ‘in-between’, distance between reality and fiction, the place where poetry is at home… LOOKING AT YOU (REVIVED) AGAIN will be staged in a theatre à l'italienne. An empty, disused Italian-style theatre, with the magic of its memories whispering from every nook and cranny. Gold, velvet and sparkle. Odéon, Athénée - names that conjure up dreams. Night-time. A secret ceremony, and we are invited. Three persons playing for themselves the personages of their own history. Scattered memories from their own lives; past, present, future. Quest. Journey… - between reality and fiction, - between life and death, - between dream and reality.” EV

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“The world a stage. Madame James on the balcony, Abe, with outstretched arms, at the front of the stage. Where does theatre stand today? What form will it have to take to reach its audience?” EV p.d: Do you love me ? abe : Love ? LOOKING AT YOU (REVIVED) AGAIN

“The future I saw before me is already part of the past without ever having been the present.” GREGORY MOTTON, LOOKING AT YOU (REVIVED) AGAIN

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“Among Motton’s plays, REVIENS À TOI (ENCORE) is perhaps the one with the most biblical references. ‘Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves’, exclaims Abe. Eric Vigner’s staging steers clear of the traps of undue preoccupation with the misery of life, of the pious images of social realism, of religious allegory, presenting the message as it filters through a mix of humour and strangeness.” RENÉ SOLIS (LIBÉRATION, 7 Oktober 1994)

! At that time, Eric Vigner is laureate of the programme ‘Villa Médicis Hors les Murs’. ! BAJAZET by JEAN RACINE in 1995, he accepts an invitation by JEAN-PIERRE MIQUEL to the Comédie-Française, the ‘house of Molière’, to stage Racine’s play at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier with MARTINE CHEVALLIER, JEAN DAUTREMAY, BÉRANGÈRE DAUTUN, ISABELLE GARDIEN, ALAIN LENGLET, ÉRIC RUF and VÉRONIQUE VELLA.

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BAJAZET is the sixth of Racine’s plays. After the triumph of his BÉRÉNICE, that tear-jerker steeped in elegy, Racine felt the need to show his mettle. He wrote BAJAZET, the most violent and carnal of his tragedies, drawing for his inspiration on Turkish history. The setting of the play is Byzantium, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in the seraglio of Sultan Amurat.

“I did not focus on any sort of analysis - psychoanalytical, political, let alone psychological. Nor did I try to bridge the distance that has intervened between the art of tragedy and modern people. Roland Barthes quite rightly said that it is because of its very distance from us that tragedy can touch us. I approached the tragedy much in the same way as Champollion approached the hieroglyphs. What should I do with this strange language? Play what is written. Nothing more. Everything is said in Racine’s verse. What interested me was Racine the poet. I did not care to know why Racine wrote Bajazet. For me, the question was: How? I saw Bajazet as a dramatic poem, and in this dramatic poem one element, and only one, took pride of place: the alexandrine.” EV

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“Eric Vigner has met the challenge. His chosen register is one of fascination and slowness. A setting that is Japanese rather than Byzantine serves as the vessel for the cruel gold that flows, like lava, from the actors’ lips. Farewell heroes! Farewell prophets!. No fatal tension between aristocratic posture and tenderness, between nature and the sublime, as in Corneille. In Racine’s work, all the ancient materials that make up tragedy unite to become, in a language as new and plain as can be, poetry pure and simple. His characters do not live, they exist merely on paper: Roxane is merely a name and a voice. And yet the divine poet wrests a miraculous sigh from her marble lips. They all speak of themselves as of others and, if they dare to speak up against the silence, it is because without their words, without the alexandrine, the pain would be too great to bear. Speaking does not cure. Racine does not offer a cure, he brings calm, like a cool hand touching a feverish brow.” FRÉDÉRIC FERNEY (LE FIGARO, 16 May 1995)

“Bajazet says that it is better to die than to abandon what we love.” EV

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On 12 January 1996, after several months of renovation, Eric Vigner inaugurates his new seat in Lorient: the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient, Centre Dramatique de Bretagne - the only centre of dramatic art in Brittany. For the opening he stages L'ILLUSION COMIQUE by PIERRE CORNEILLE with NAZIM BOUDJENAH, DOMINIQUE CHARPENTIER, CÉCILE GARCIA-FOGEL, ÉRIC GUÉRIN, DENIS LÉGER-MILHAU, GILBERT MARCANTOGNINI, JÉRÉMIE OLER, GRÉGOIRE OESTERMANN, GUY PARIGOT, ÉRIC PETITJEAN and LE QUATUOR MATHEUS.

Written in 1636, L'ILLUSION COMIQUE is unique in PIERRE CORNEILLE’s œuvre.

“Corneille’s genius lies in breaking away from all the theatrical forms of which he is both witness and master - commedia dell'arte, comedy, and tragedy - to invent on their basis a new theatre which was a posteriori to be called classic. L'ILLUSION COMIQUE is somewhere halfway between the ancient theatre and the new. This new theatre has not yet taken definite shape, it is as yet incomplete, in the process of growing out of new values -the values of humanism. It is a work-in-progress in every respect. In terms of architecture, theatre, so far an open-air spectacle performed in the streets, returns to the interior of buildings. In terms of content, it focuses on amusement and entertainment. But Corneille says, what interests us is not entertainment for entertainment’s sake, pleasure for pleasure’s sake; what interests us is probably more important: the human being. The choice of L'ILLUSION COMIQUE for the opening of the Centre Dramatique de Bretagne was to bear witness to this: its importance lay in the very fact that it represented more than anything else the painful transition from the old to the new, that duality which is the secret of life and of all things created. I share the belief that one cannot invent the future without harking back to the past, without sharing, once again, responsibility with our fathers, the very fathers we criticise.” EV

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L'ILLUSION COMIQUE thus touches upon an eternal theme: the relation between a father and his son and their mutual forgiveness as they see and find each other in the mirror of the stage. Primadant, for six years without news of his son Clindor, asks the ‘magician’ Alcandre to find Clindor. Before the father’s eyes Alcandre conjures up his son’s past. Time passes before his eyes, different persons, shadows, people alive… throughout the piece, what happens on stage leads up to the moment of pardon. The father must forgive his son, the son forgive his father; then everything becomes possible.

“The first thing to remember is that at the beginning there is nothing: it is the first day of the world. An actor comes on stage and tells a story, and this is when it all begins. Then, another one follows him, follows his footsteps, digs something up, picks up a theme, discovers its vestiges; then comes another player, and still others… and in the end what has been created is a memory, life, a story. And next day one starts all over again, and so on and so forth every day…” EV

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“Clindor meets Matamor, a figure out of old-time theatre, born of an ancient culture, - or Matamor meets him, I can’t say which. The exchange between them is very fine, this divesting oneself, relinquishing... Matamor relinquishes his role, takes off his clothes to leave his place to Clindor. Matamor has killed the famous captain of the commedia dell’arte, but he has shot his bolt and he knows it. He is about to become a Don Quixote. But sooner or later he has to confront reality. The “comical illusion” is the transition from illusion to reality. Corneille traces the development of modern theatre, opens the door to a form of theatre that is to emerge only much later.” EV

“What is called Life in creation is, in all forms and in all beings, one and the same spirit, a single flame“… To enjoy images, to love them for themselves, would demand that the psychoanalyst accept a poetic education on the fringes of all such erudition. Hence fewer dreams by way of the animus and more by way of the anima. Less of understanding by way of intersubjective psychology and more of sensitivity through a psychology of the familiar.” GASTON BACHELARD, THE FLAME OF A CANDLE

The production is shown at the most important theatres of France and is nominated for the Prix MOLIÈRE.

In a matter of just a few years, the CDDB becomes one of the leading centres of creative theatre in France. It enables Eric Vigner to continue on his chosen course and to invite artists such as ALFREDO ARIAS, PETER BROOK, JÉRÔME DESCHAMPS, JOËL JOUANNEAU, JAN LAUWERS, CLAUDE RÉGY, CHRISTIANE VÉRICEL,... as well as a new generation of directors, actors and playwrights such as MARION AUBERT, IRINA BROOK, OLIVIER CADIOT, PHILIPPE CALVARIO, IRINA DALLE, RÉMI DE VOS, NATHALIE FILLION, HERVÉ GUILLOTEAU, MICHEL JACQUELIN, BÉRENGÈRE JANNELLE, DANIEL JEANNETEAU, LUDOVIC LAGARDE, JEAN LAMBERT-WILD, DAVID LESCOT, MADELEINE LOUARN, FABRICE MELQUIOT, FRANÇOIS MOREL, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, SOPHIE PÉREZ, CHRISTOPHE PELLET, THIERRY DE PERETTI, ÉRIC RUF, JEAN-YVES RUF …

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Internationally, the CDDB cooperates with the 7 STAGES in Atlanta (USA), the THEATRO GARIBALDI in Palermo (Sicily), L'ESPACE GO in Montréal (Canada), the KENNEDY CENTER in Washington (USA), the NATIONAL THEATRE OF KOREA in Seoul (South Korea), the NATIONAL THEATRE OF ALBANIA in Tirana, and the Paris Autumn FESTIVAL to present the works of FEDERICO LEON (Argentina), CARLO CECCHI (Sicily), CADEN MANSON (USA), SATOSHI MIYAGI (Japan) and SPIRO SCIMONE (Sicily).

The graphic artists M/M have been associated with the CDDB since it opened its doors and have been responsible for all aspects of visual and graphic work at the centre. They emerged in 1995 and have since become known for their collaboration with YOSHI YAMAMOTO, ÉTIENNE DAHO, PHILIPPE PARRENO, PIERRE HUYGHE, LIAM GILLICK, GABRIELA FRIDRIKSDOTTIR, BJÖRK and recently also MADONNA.

In 1996, Eric Vigner produces BRANCUSI CONTRE ÉTATS-UNIS (A historic lawsuit - 1928), which he adapted for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Avignon Festival for a presentation in the Conclave Hall of the Papal Palace, with PIERRE BAUX, ODILE BOUGEARD, PHILIPPE COTTEN, DONATIEN GUILLOT, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, VINCENT OZANON, LAURENT POITRENAUX, MYRTO PROCOPIOU, ALICE VARENNE. The play was subsequently staged at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, then at the pithead of a mine at Forbach, at the Tribunal of Pau and at the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient.

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The Brancusi case deals with the question of what was a work of art in the eyes of an American customs officer in the Port of New York towards the end of the 1920s. This was the question an American court had to decide in a lawsuit that was to become famous, with Brancusi filing suit against the US Customs Service. One of Brancusi’s works, “Oiseau” (The Bird) had not been recognised as a work of art by a customs officer who levied a 40% ad valorem duty on it upon entry on US territory, the rate applicable to all sorts of manufactured products, while works of art were deemed exempt from customs payment. The sculptor sued the American administration and won.

Q : You said that the Exhibit 1 is a work of art and in your opinion represents a bird that is flying ? A : No, not that it represents a bird, but it does suggest, is has the qualities of suggesting a flying bird, suggesting the flight of a bird. It does not represent a bird. Q : It does not represent a bird ? A : No. Q : Has the same quality of representing a fish ? A : No. Q : If it was called a fish ?... A : Not what it is called, only it gives you the feeling. Not because it is called a bird, but because it does suggest the quality of flight. Q : That is the only thing that makes it a work of art ? A : No, the form, the balance, the beautiful sense of workmanship, and the pleasure that it gives me to look at it. Q : You get the same amount of pleasure from any beautiful highly polished piece of metal ? A : No sir. “The word ‘bird’ did not have the same meaning for the counsel for the defence as it had for plaintiff. For the one it meant a flying object, for the other it constituted the very essence of flight. In the Brancusi trial, the testimony of different players was couched in the same words, but the tone of voice was different and so was the emotional content. The meaning as such was not enough. When testifying they testified to different things. On stage, I am not interested in meaning, not at all. What interests me is the language, the writing, as poetic material – the word per se. … It is not meaning that we are concerned with: what we work with is the tone of voice, what we search for is the moment when the tone makes sense.” EV

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“Witnessing a trial that by its very nature is charged with theatricality, where time does justice to the artist in question, requires of the modern spectator radical self-searching, forces him or her to probe their ability to react to something new. In this way, the theatre gives rise to a debate about the essence of things.” GEORGES BANU (ART-PRESSE, December 1996)

“A trial. A confined space in which sit an areopagus of sages whose calling it is to decide what is, and what is not, a work of art. As always and everywhere, two words, two worlds, two truths face each other. Unable to communicate: Knowledge and Knowing. And then, as though sliding down an inclined plane, “The Bird” dematerialises and scatters into space, while the spoken word expands and assumes a bodily form somewhere else, in the field of sound. It is a forum, a public space, where the Conference of Birds meets, where the actors, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s ‘The sky above Berlin’ (also known as Wings of Desire), try to redefine the rules that govern the functioning of the world by the redefining the word. It is all about the wind, about flying, about the flight of feelings. The question is about the word that participates in the creation of the world. As one invents the world by inventing the word. The question is how dramatic art can do justice to it. A working hypothesis!” BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER

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“ FLYING HAS OCCUPIED MY MIND AS LONG AS I LIVE. ”

BRANCUSI ! In the same year Eric Vigner directs at the CDDB the reading of OISEAUX (The Birds) by ARISTOPHANES adapted by STÉPHANIE COHEN, with the cast that had done BRANCUSI CONTRE ÉTATS-UNIS. ! He also stages TRAFICS D'ART within the framework of the “quarts d'heure” (quarter hours) in a unique place, the old LU cake factory at Nantes, with ÉMERICK GUÉZOU et LIONEL MONIER.

“I started with a list of all the cakes that had been produced there, using their names in alphabetical order as my text. The idea was to revive - through words - the memory of the LU factory with the theatre forming the link. The question of theatre as an art has determined my work right from the beginning. Are we to present recipes, know-how, a ‘style’ acquired in the course of putting plays on the stage, or are we to reconsider the question of theatrical action each and every time?” EV

TRAFICS D'ART is an event in the form of a confrontation: Subsidised living art - all disciplines lumped together - on the one hand and the production of, and trade in, objects that are subject to market laws on the other. The audience is invited to witness and take part in this confrontation.

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In 1997, Eric Vigner produces TOI COUR, MOI JARDIN by JACQUES REBOTIER at the CDDB with L'ENSEMBLE SILLAGE DE BREST - PHILIPPE ARRI-BLACHETTE, ISA LAGARDE, DIDIER MEU, SÉBASTIEN ROUILLARD, ÈVE PAYEUR, VINCENT THOMAS - et ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL. It is the first time Jacques Rebotier placed one of his works in the hands of a stage director.

“I have always taken great interest in the sound of words, the musicality of phrases - even the cry: The piercing cry uttered by Ernesto in LA PLUIE D'ÉTÉ, the death cry of Martine Chevalier or BAJAZET’s long cry of love; the actors in BRANCUSI CONTRE ETATS-UNIS sought the musical score behind the rhetoric and the language of the law. In Jacques Rebotier I found a man for whom this aspect is a prime concern. He uses the fabric of everyday words, he probes the most insignificant moments of everyday life. It is fun to listen to the language and to discover something new in every little phrase as though one heard it for the first time.” EV

“Sixteenth of June, in a theatre. The stage is filled by an immense tongue. I feel it as if it filled my mouth. The theatre is my mouth. The curtain forms the teeth, the drapery hanging from above the palate, the uvula dangling at the back, the drapes on the sides the tails of Harlequin’s coat; the apron. I start imagining characters that represent phonetic elements: labials, buccals, ‘m’, ‘b’ and ‘p’ on the apron ; ‘t’ and ‘d’, on the proscenium, as well as some old-time r’s rolled in the ancient mode, with the tip of the tongue placed against the sockets of the teeth; nasals high up in the flies; an ‘l’, hunch-backed, liquid sound dropping inside and out; at the back, ‘k’ and ‘g’ as well as our modern ‘r’, guttural and distant as it forces the air against the soft palate. Taking words for what they are: characters.” JACQUES REBOTIER, LE DÉSORDRE DES LANGAGES

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In the same year 1997 Vigner organises a number of readings at the CDDB: ! LE FUNAMBULE (The Tightrope-Walker) by JEAN GENET with LAMBERT WILSON.

! UN POLONAIS AU NOIR (Black Pole) by KARST WOUDSTRA with FRÉDÉRIC CONSTANT, ISABELLE HURTIN, ISABELLE NANTY, ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, LAURENT POITRENAUX, BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER. ! LA DOULEUR by MARGUERITE DURAS with ANNE BROCHET and BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER.

“With the exception of Corneille and Racine, I have mostly staged works by contemporary authors (Duras, Sarraute, Motton, Dubillard…), and always with young actors. In 1997 I was invited to hold a workshop with students of the Ecole Nationale de Strasbourg. For this workshop I looked for an author who wrote in French, whose style was markedly ‘expressionist’ and required a fair amount of body language. With this project in mind, and at the same time recalling the productions of LUCRÈCE BORGIA and HERNANI by Antoine Vitez, I read VICTOR HUGO and discovered MARION DE LORME. As it is always enigmatic texts that set me working, this two-month project with students made me wish for more.” EV

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On 19 September 1998, Vigner produces VICTOR HUGO’s MARION DE LORME at the CDDB, with DAVID CLAVEL, MARYSE CUPAIOLO, RODOLPHE DANA, DAMIEN DORSAZ, NADIR LEGRAND, STÉPHANE MERCOYROL, THOMAS ROUX, JEAN-YVES RUF, FRÉDÉRIC SOLUNTO, JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS and L’ENSEMBLE MATHEUS: FRÉDÉRIC & CATHERINE MÜHLHAÜSER, STÉPHAN ELOFFE, FERNADO LAGE, AUDE VANACKERE, THIERRY RUNARVOT, STÉPHANE GOASGUEN. He started from a number of sketches that had preceded the final version of the play that came out in 1831. The first version of MARION DE LORME, which Hugo had written in 1829 at the age of 27, failed to pass censorship and was never staged until now.

“After the glorious revolution of 1830, when theatre had achieved its liberty along with the general public, the plays buried alive by censorship during the age of Restoration burst out of their tombs and noisily spread over all Parisian theatres, where the public, still breathless with joy and anger, welcomed them jubilantly, and justly so. It took some weeks until all traces of censorship were wiped out, to the delight of all. The Comédie-Française remembered Marion de Lorme, and a delegation of ranking personalities sought out the author and urged him to permit it to be performed now that the prohibition had been lifted. They felt that the invective against Charles X in the fourth act - the passage that had caused the piece to be prohibited by the censors - would ensure the success of the work on account of the political reaction to be expected. It was for precisely this reason that the author decided to hold his work back - at least for some limited time. The political views he had expressed in Marion de Lorme made him recall that, at the age of sixteen, when his political passions had persuaded him to enter the political stage, his political views - his political illusions - had favoured the Royalists and the uprising of the Vendée. He remembered that he had composed a Coronation Ode - admittedly at a time when all the world acclaimed their popular ruler. No censorship, no halberds now! He wanted to make sure that no one could blame him one day for his past – a past marked by mistakes, certainly, but one of honest conviction and a clean conscience, free of any self-interest, just as he hoped his whole life would be judged by the world. He understood that what others could well enjoy - politically motivated success on account of the downfall of the King - was not for him; that there was no loophole for him through which he could escape from public wrath. He did what he had to do, what every honest man would have done in his place. He refused to permit his piece to be performed. He

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admitted that he did not go in for deliberately provoked scandal or political allusions that would ensure his success, for their effect would be of little value and of short duration. It had been his intention to portray, as truthfully as he could as an artist, King Louis XIII, not any of his descendants. And the very absence of censorship made it all the more incumbent upon authors to act as their own censors - honestly, conscientiously and with all due severity. Only in this way could they hope to uphold the dignity of their art. Those who enjoyed complete freedom were all the more obliged to practise moderation. Today, as three hundred and sixty five days separate us from the downfall of the King - three hundred and sixty five events in these eventful times; today, as the flood of public indignation has ceased to batter the crumbling ruins of Restoration, just as the sea recedes from the deserted coastline; today, when Charles X has fallen even more into oblivion than Louis XIII, the author submits his work to the public, and the public receives it from his hands in the same spirit as it is relinquished - naively, without ulterior motives, as a work of art, for better or for worse. In this age of political preoccupation, it is important, perhaps even all-important, that a literary work should be seen as just that - a product of literature.” VICTOR HUGO, Preface MARION DE LORME

“Hugo wanted to create a utopian form of theatre - one that strove to do both one thing and its exact opposite. The moment paradox assumes such importance in the play, you stumble over the problem of how to put it on stage. In the 19th century the prevailing quasi-naturalist form of production did not lend itself to the staging of Hugo’s plays, in which the imaginary, fantastic and symbolic dominate. This sort of theatre is so much out of the ordinary that, in our day and age, any form of staging it is bound to remain tentative, for to ‘play it all’ is impossible. What is of interest is this attempt, this tentativeness, and this is what I am interested in. One can only show how this theatre unfolds, how it writes itself - as though romantic theatre anticipated a specific form of aloofness. This theatre is one in which the spectator has to do the work: he is confronted with questions that he has to find answers to. Hugo’s theatre leaves everything wide open. He proposes one way of seeing the ancient world and what the modern world might be like, and calls upon the audience, as individuals, to seek their place somewhere in between the proposed hypotheses.

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It is the identity of each individual within the group that is at stake. I have to decide about my own world - all the more so since romantic theatre is one that lifts up my self, that asserts my self in freedom. This does not mean that we have to choose between the romantic and classical worlds, since the Romantics want to have it all. In this respect the story of MARION DE LORME is edifying; as I see it, she discovers her true self at the very heart of illusion, in her concrete experience of theatre as she plays Chimène. Here, theatre assumes the role of revealer of one’s conscience. In the words of Hamlet: ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’.”EV

“ VERSE IS THE OPTICAL FORM OF THOUGHT. ”

VICTOR HUGO

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“The words that pour forth from that shade are no longer a story but they represent something, they are something active that goes directly to the ear and imparts energy. Once drawn into the flow, the spectator no longer watches the evolution of the characters in the romantic melodrama that MARION DE LORME appeared to be at first sight: He surrenders to the voices, even imagines seeing them as they pass through the thin tulle woven of words. In reality, caught by the rhythm, scanning as though his heart were beating outside his body, the spectator discovers that action lies not in the unceasing rushing forward which eats up one’s life but in receiving, in being impregnated, in a direct face-to-face encounter, with the wind of language. What is strange - but it will appear strange only later, on reflection, not in the course of the play, at the time, not of feeling, but of understanding - what is strange is to discover that Eric Vigner has scrupulously respected the dramatic poem, verse for verse, and that this is enough to obliterate the melodrama. The book speaks softly. And the scene before one’s mental eye? Is there some reticence which makes the word wrap itself in its abstraction as though ideas did not have a place in the body? Eric Vigner’s MARION brings theatre back into the mouth, even places it on the tongue: there, quite naturally, the word unveils itself and the unfolding of syllable after syllable creates in us a rawness that makes all that fetters us fall away.” BERNARD NOËL

For a year MARION DE LORME tours large parts of France and is notably presented at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris throughout January 1999. In 1999 Vigner is for the second time invited to the Comédie-Française. He directs MOLIERE’s L'ÉCOLE DES FEMMES on 25 Septembre 1999, with CATHERINE SAMIE, IGOR TYCZKA, ÉRIC RUF, BRUNO RAFFAELLI, LAURENT REY, ROGER MOLLIEN, JEAN-CLAUDE DROUOT, JACQUES POIX-TERRIER, JOHANNA KORTHALS-ALTÈS and the musicians VINCENT THOMAS, SÉBASTIEN SUREL, CHRISTINE FONLUPT, opening the season at Salle Richelieu. He draws on the talent of great actors in the ensemble of the Comédie-Française, with some of whom he had worked before: BRUNO RAFFAELLI for REVIENS À TOI (ENCORE), ERIC RUF for BAJAZET, and casts a young actress from the Conservatoire in the part of Agnès.

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“A sweet and staid look made me love Agnès, amongst other children, when she was only four… I have brought her up with so much tenderness and forethought; I have had her with me from her infancy; I have indulged in the fondest hopes about her; my heart trusted to her growing charms; I have fondled her as my own for thirteen years, as I imagined… I love her, and that love is my great difficulty.” says Arnolphe MOLIÈRE, L’ÉCOLE DES FEMMES (SCHOOL OF WIVES) Act 1, Scene 1 “This is where everything starts. The initial moment is love. Arnolphe encounters love for the first time, on that day thirteen years ago, in the person of one little girl among a bevy of others; and this new feeling - unknown to him until then -, this overwhelming experience lays the foundation for an architecture he builds in his dream - a city, laws and rules, a school… Arnolphe’s vision is a personal one, a highly individual Utopia which is exemplary in nature. Arnolphe has brought Agnès up away from the world, in a closed world, on the philosophical principle ‘I think, therefore I am’ to prepare her for the freedom of being. He loves Agnès as God loves his creation. Agnès loves Arnolphe as a daughter loves her father. Horace, on the other hand, represents the outside world; when he enters that enclosed space he causes it to break open: desire is born, love changes its nature. Arnolphe no longer sees Agnès as a child in a Utopian vision but as a woman. This is the paradox in Arnolphe: just because his plan is a complete success, it is bound to fail completely - he cannot marry the woman he has created. In order to give his work perpetuity in the real world, he gives this woman in marriage to Horace. Agnès brings him back to the real world. As Agnès becomes a woman, Arnolphe, the Creator God, the master, turns into a man. We witness the birth of a man.” EV

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Molière’s eighth play, L'ÉCOLE DES FEMMES, is his first original five-act verse comedy. It was first performed at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in 1662 and met with mixed reactions. It gave rise to polemics that are still known today as the School of Women dispute. Its latest production at the Comédie-Française dated back to 1983. Vigner comes up with project that involves hard and strenuous work, and an unusual interpretation of Molière’s text.

“The essential thing in this work of Vigner’s is his capacity to make the audience hear not only Molière but also his echo.” RENÉ SOLIS (LIBÉRATION, 30 September 1999)

“At the time of Marion de Lorme Bernard Noël, in a meeting with his public, admitted that he was extremely pessimistic and added, ‘if there is anything that can save the world, it is diction …’. Lacan’s texts about L'École des femmes are among the finest I’ve ever read. He says that L'École des femmes is the manifesto of classical comedy at its best, and adds that romantic theatre - Victor Hugo - is the death of classical comedy.

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I have just staged Marion de Lorme, which is set in the 17th century, the time when classical theatre was born … with Corneille the father of classical tragedy. L'École des femmes made Molière the master of classical comedy. It was this difference in artistic and political position that gave rise to the legendary conflict regarding L'École des femmes. Racine owed everything to Molière, but he wrote perfect theatre - together they form an equilateral triangle. There is no such thing as perfection. Molière’s theatre combines intelligence, constructive genius and emotions. And that is what the story of Arnolphe is all about, and the reason why he resigns at the end of the play. Arnolphe is a 17th-century humanist, making the human being the centre of the universe. He even ends up giving Agnès, his very own creation, to the young Horace. Having made Agnès a woman, he also turns Horace into a man. He has carried his project to its end and withdraws. Molière does with Racine what Arnolphe does with Horace. And Horace is not given to sentiment. Perhaps he is better at telling stories, but he has no heart. He foreshadows Dom Juan. Soon, Agnès will become Célimène. L'École des femmes is a matrix, a womb that contains the whole of Molière’s œuvre.” EV

“PLAYING A SCENE IS FIRST AND FOREMOST SPEAKING IT.” LOUIS JOUVET

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“Eric Vigner’s mise en scène strips a text naked by seeking out the internal punctuation of the language which puts the body in motion, and introduces, in the guise of a comedy, the ways and byways of childhood and love. With the pace set by a musical trio, here we are confronted with a Molière whose shades of tone grow out of a fascinating mix, a fusion of speech and listening.” JEAN CHOLLET (ACTUALITÉ DE LA SCÉNOGRAPHIE, October 1999)

L'ÉCOLE DES FEMMES is presented at the CDDB in Lorient in June 2000. Between 1993 and 1999, Eric Vigner designs his stage sets in cooperation with the scenographer Claude Chestier. From 2000 onwards, Eric Vigner returns to his early love, visual art, and confirms his ability to deal with space.

“I try to invent something that would amount to the baroque of the 21st century. I am striving to go beyond the imagery of theatre, to ‘open’ the stage so that the spectator can travel through all dimensions of the performance and imagine his own story.” EV

On 11 November 2000 he opens the season of the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient with a performance of RHINOCÉROS by IONESCO with JEAN-DAMIEN BARBIN, NATHALIE LACROIX, FRANCIS LEPLAY, JEAN-FRANÇOIS PERRIER, THOMAS ROUX, JEAN-BAPTISTE SASTRE and JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS.

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On 31 December 2000, Vigner stages his first opera for the Opéra de Lausanne, LA DIDONE by CAVALLI, conducted by CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET. The two projects are interconnected, RHINOCÉROS comes to life in the opera décor designed and built in the summer of 2000 at the CDDB in Lorient. ! IONESCO’s RHINOCÉROS had been absent from the stage for no less than forty years.

“We all know that criticism seems impossible, that the criteria vary, that the criteria are not congruent with the work, that, when they speak of a literary work, critics often do so from the point of view of psychology or sociology, or history, or the history of literature and so on. In other words, they invariably stand beside the work in question, in the context, as it were; the text does not touch them although it is the text that matters the most ; it is the text they ought to regard, the uniqueness of the text as a living body, as a creation turned creature, rather than the context, which is general, external, impersonal. What matters - what matters to me - is without resemblance to anything else, neither to sociology nor to history, what matters to me is the work’s irreducibility to history or society, its own specific story, not another one. All history of art is the history of its expression. Every and any new expression means an event, something arrives, something new. What lingers in my mind, then, is that expression is substance and form at the same time. Not the story is what matters, but how it is written, how any written story reveals a deeper meaning. To appreciate how a story is told rather than what it tells, this is the hallmark of a literary vocation.” EUGÈNE IONESCO, Conversations with Claude Bonnefoy

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“Out go the stage sets of provincial France dating from the 1950s, the small market, the small office… An empty stage with a rhinoceros in its midst, disembowelled, the enormous nightmare of the only plausible human character in the play, Bérenger. Jean-Damien Barbin transforms his adventure into an exclusive confrontation with the Beast. By contrast, the other witnesses of its intrusion, who all change metaphorically into rhinoceroses, speak with the sentencious slowness of shadows in a dream. Bérenger dreams all the things that surround and engulf him.” CHRISTOPHE DESHOULIÈRE

! CAVALLI’s LA DIDONE with JUANITA LASCARRO, TOPI LEHTIPUU, IVAN LUDLOW, KATALIN VARKONYI, ANNE-LISE SOLLIED, HÉLÈNE LE CORRE, MONIQUE SIMON, JAËL AZZARETTI, JOHN BOWEN, DANIEL SALAS, GUDJON OSKARSSON, CHRISTOPHE GILLET and the chorus of the Opéra de Lausanne is the beginning of a close cooperation with the young conductor CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET, one of the leading Baroque musicians, and his ensemble LES TALENS LYRIQUES.

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Aeneas, the Trojan hero and son of Venus, flees Troy, laid in ruins by the Greeks. Landing on the shores of Carthage, he falls in love with the Queen, Dido, but leaves her soon in order to fulfil his destiny imposed by the gods. Dido consoles herself by marrying the king of Libya, Jarbas.

Christophe Rousset had been studying Cavalli for a long time. He had already conducted LA DIDONE in the course of a workshop. The work constitutes an unfulfilled dream, which he got a chance to fulfil through close cooperation with a man of the theatre. For Eric Vigner this first approach to opera means venturing onto completely new ground. With a 25-head choir, 14 soloists, 18 instrumentalists and four actors, Vigner has everything he needs to embed his imagination in a musical universe.

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“Whether it is theatre or opera makes little difference to me. What I ask myself is whether it affects me, inspires me, jogs my intellect, speaks to my heart. It’s the innermost heart that interests me, not the idea.” EV

To give life to this sensual fable, the Rousset-Vigner team recruits a young cast. The assignment of parts is the key to the story: one singer sings both Creusa and Dido, so Aeneas falls in love with one and the same woman. At the same time, Aeneas and Jarbas are almost twins - so Dido loves one man, and marries him in the end. The couples merge in one and their identities become blurred. Is Aeneas’s African episode perhaps no more than an exotic dream, the dream of an amour fou, in the middle of an unrelenting fate dictated by the Heavens? Doesn’t Dido merely dream that she succumbs to the advances of a wandering warrior before she resigns herself to marrying her original suitor? And isn’t the spectator, too, drawn into a troubled dream in a mythological country where gods tear each other to pieces and humans make love in the shade of a rhinoceros?”

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In 2001, Vigner embarks on a diptych on the works of MARGUERITE DURAS. ! On 17 October 2001, he produces LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE (THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE), her adaptation of the play by JAMES LORD based on a novella by HENRY JAMES. For the set design, Vigner is inspired by the three authors: Duras, Lord and James, the two literary forms - a novella and a play - the two languages - English and French - an extraordinary mix to which a number of people contributed, all of whom left strong marks.

JAMES LORD, who lived in Paris, is considered one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of modern art. He became well known for his monumental biography of ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, followed by biographies of BACON, PICASSO and DORA MAAR... Giacometti painted his portrait. Lord’s BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, his only work for the theatre, has never been published. While respecting the structure of the novella by HENRY JAMES, he introduceds in his play a pictorial dimension, the portrait of the Fourth Marquess by VAN DYCK. In the sixties, he collaborates with MARGUERITE DURAS for a french version, which remains unpublished. Only twenty years later, Marguerite Duras finalises the play, turning it into a set of six ‘tableaux’ with a prologue and an epilogue, stressing the notions of time, memory and secrecy. Vigner, for his part, delves into his imaginary museum, which has its roots in the quattrocento - the invention of perspective - and spans the centuries up to modern and contemporary art. For LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE, he chooses two actors who had already embarked on two ventures with him and promised to personify something like a mythical couple of the kind you find in cinema, or a duo in the world of music: JEAN-DAMIEN BARBIN (Rhinocéros) and JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS (Marion de Lorme, Rhinocéros). In this play they become ‘John and Catherine’ like ‘a man and a woman’. They could well be characters out of a 19th-century novel or out of opera, of stories or legends like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, characters like old-time music hall stars - or simply a modern couple of our day and age.

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Vigner invents a new process for the set that consists of moving images playing with varying focal depths. A FRAGONARD landscape on a bamboo curtain veils the stage. Space is conjured up by a gallery of VAN DYCK portraits, colours and images which fade and decompose.

“Writing isn’t telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of the story. It’s telling a story through its absence.” MARGUERITE DURAS, LA VIE MATERIELLE

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“Behind an image there is another one, and as one passes on there’s another and yet another one, until we rid ourselves of the images, until we finally accept merely to be there, in empty space, freed from all appearances.” EV

“We are all tears. For we, too, have understood something. ‘What? Hard to say!’ ‘Traces’, ‘little nothings’, ‘fleeting feelings’. The absence of a story, memories of blank space, a tightrope act. Thanks to his two actors and a lyrical scenography - tensioned like the strings of a lyre - Eric Vigner grafts onto it some additional reality. A marvel.” SOPHIE KHAN (CASSANDRE, March-April 2002)

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Throughout the play, the spectator travels through a story, several stories, and also the history of painting. Vigner tries to leave the door open for any interpretation, from reality to illusion, without ever giving an answer. He invites his audience to pass through these images, these spaces, to go beyond them, transgress them, to seek their own way, in order to discover their own history, to find their own intimacy.

“‘Some plays leave indelible traces, ineradicable marks, images that surface from time to time, triggered by certain events. This is what remains, the heritage that is never forgotten’. The actors, I think, have interpreted (if not the most beautiful) the strongest, the most necessary play of recent times - independently of the seasons that define history, it ruptures the obbligato rhythm of historicity.” CHRISTOPHE DESHOULIÈRES

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LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE runs for a whole month in Lorient, and now forms part of the repertory. It is shown at the Espace Go in Montréal (2002) and the Kennedy Center/Eisenhower Theater in Washington (2004). ! In 2002, Vigner is invited to the Comédie-Française to stage a play by MARGUERITE DURAS - the first play of the author to become part of the theatre’s repertory. He chooses SAVANNAH BAY, one of her most enigmatic pieces, to open the season on 14 September 2002 at Salle Richelieu. He works with two outstanding actresses - the doyenne of the Comédie-Française, CATHERINE SAMIE, who had also played L'ÉCOLE DES FEMMES and CATHERINE HIEGEL.

“There are artists who take part in inventing the future, and Marguerite Duras is without any doubt one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I would wish that in addition to Savannah Bay, some other works by her were included in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. Whoever has met this genuinely charismatic artist, through her works or in real life, has experienced the profound upheaval she can cause in each and every one of us. Marguerite Duras is also a woman who throughout her life has written about what love amounts to, and her life, and her œuvre, are engulfed by that feeling. She is a woman who gives what she has to give with force and passion. That her work should as of now form part of the repertory of the Comédie-Française is more than justified; and opening the new season at the beginning of the 21st century with her text is a genuine challenge for those who do theatre today.” EV

“The play is made for these two actresses; we feel at home with Duras, in her company. It is a women’s affair. The two actresses have what it takes, they are intimately familiar with what she wants to convey. Catherine Samie has been with the Comédie-Française for a long time. She is the trustee of the memories - both of the theatre and of life itself - necessary to fill that role. And who else but Catherine Hiegel could have been her opposite number, quite different in nature, belonging to another theatre family - because the relationship of the two actresses is also an affair between families.” EV

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“Eric Vigner crams the stage with a system of curtains made of three million glass beads that reflect the light, sparkle, dance, open and close as the actors move, conjure up pictures and at the same time invite us to pass around them and through them. An uninhabitable space (even though all the images created are intimate ones), a space of which only the margins can be taken possession of; a place of light, and only of light. Savannah Bay is the light of death, the dazzling light of love.” MARTIN BETHENOD (VOGUES, October 2002)

You don’t know who you are, who you were, you know you have played, you don’t know what you played, what you are playing, you know you have to play, you don’t know what, you play. Nor can you remember What your roles were,

Nor which of your children are alive or dead. Nor which are the locations, the settings, the capitals, or the continents where you cried out the passion of lovers. Only that the people in the audience have bought a ticket and that somebody owes them a performance. You are the stage actress, The splendor of the age of the world, Its crowning achievement, The glory of its last delivery. You have forgotten everything except Savannah, Savannah Bay. Savannah Bay is you. SAVANNAH BAY

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“All the images seen in the play are at the same time intimate images. Savannah Bay is a work - ours and yours - that does not unveil its secret but hides it.” EV

“Eric Vigner brings forth energy, creates a curtain of moving beads that catch the light, day, night, blood flowing in murmuring streams. A curtain turned actor. Like an iridescent memory, a cruel one, it is thrown across the stage and suddenly falls while intimations of death draw near. Eric Vigner, whose relations with Marguerite Duras were marked by a deep friendship, gives Savannah Bay its rightful place in the repertory of the Comédie-Française, thanks to the unique beauty of a sculpture made of moving beads. We are moved and troubled, discreet witnesses to a love story between an old woman who is no longer alive and a young man who has forgotten nothing.” LAURENCE LIBAN (L’EXPRESS, 24/30 October 2002)

SAVANNAH BAY is a co-production of the Comédie-Française and the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient. The latter organises a major tour of the play throughout France in the 2003/2004 season.

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The tour ends in Lorient in February 2004, in the Grand Théâtre (recent work of the architect HENRI GAUDIN). The CDDB, by that time Centre Dramatique National, is entrusted with the theatre programming for this new hall with a capacity of 1000 seats.

In May 2003, Vigner signs for his second opera. Invited to the Leipzig Bach Festival, he stages L'EMPIO PUNITO by ALESSANDRO MELANI in collaboration with the conductor CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET, his musicians LES TALENS LYRIQUES, and the singers MARGUERITE KRULL, MARIKA SCHÖNBERG, KRISTINA HANSSON, KATHRIN GÖRING, PAUL KONG, RICKARD SÖDERBERG, TUOMAS PURSIO, MARTIN PETZOLD.

L'EMPIO PUNITO (the punished godless) was composed 1669 for the carnival in Rome, a century before MOZARTs DON GIOVANNI. MELANI and the librettist ACCIAIUOLI treat the Don Juan's material for the first time in the opera. They use metaphors and poetic pictures to express what cannot easily be said at the time. There are neither specific places and spaces, nor exactly comprehensible time courses.

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“This opera can only play in the Orient. I think of the Serails, for example. The whole atmosphere and the seclusion of Atraces’ Empire speak for an Eastern world. In the 17th and the 18th century, there was a big fascination in Europe for the Orient, especially in Italy. The proximity to the Ottoman Empire and the cultural difference excited the imagination of European courts, for eroticism and sensuality as well as for a certain form of cruelty, the unspoken, the hidden and the shadowy picture of the Orient. The theater of the 17th and 18th century, Molière…, is sensible to the imagery of the Orient, as well as the librettists and composers of that time.” EV

“The space is a primary matter, comparable with gold, which has not been treated yet. It is a hard, a compact matter with lots of force in it. This world has its own laws, usually nothing can penetrate from the outside - a kind of golden cage. The first act still lies in the shade. The gold is not activated yet. In the course of the piece light comes into this world by Acrimante. He himself is dressed in black, but he brings light into this world. He literally lights it up, so that it shines from inside out. In the transferred sense: all characters learn something about themselves.” EV

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Vigner maintains a special relationship with the two authors of his beginnings, MARGUERITE DURAS and ROLAND DUBILLARD. After the diptych devoted to Duras, the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris recruited him for the Dubillard Festival. On 7 October 2003, he opens the first season of the CDDB at the Grand Théâtre in Lorient with « …OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES. » by ROLAND DUBILLARD, before the piece is presented in Paris in April 2004.

“It was by chance that I entered the house of Roland Dubillard at the end of adolescence, through the back door, and I stayed there. I first hit upon it in Brittany, at the regional Conservatoire. Two friends of mine were presenting a scene from LA MAISON D'OS - I didn’t understand a thing. Intrigued, fascinated, I set to work on it for my entrance exam for the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique de Paris. In due course this fascination became something of an obsession, so I wanted to graduate with it from the Paris Conservatoire. A few years later, when I was about to grow into a man who had not forgotten his childhood and its playgrounds but who showed his desire without giving in to it, it came back to my mind - it had been there all the time. It had not been visited for some thirty years, but then this very young theatre company SUZANNE M. decided to move in and make this masterpiece of dramatic literature of the second half of the 20th century their territory. SUZANNE M. had taken for its motto Dubillard’s liberating watchword - ‘It is better to say what you want than what you are expected to say, or else I’ll keep quiet. The choice is yours.’- the motto that had presided over the creation of his MAISON D’OS. This text presented itself to us as the material which would lay the foundations of the new theatre we were intent on constructing: A poetic manifesto of our intention to invent the future by means of theatre. On opening the book one is forced to dive deep down into one’s self. Either we understand Dubillard or we don’t, there is no explaining, we understand it as we feel it, it does not lend itself to analytical reduction, it takes fully hold of you or not at all. I had the same feeling with Duras, and I had the great fortune to meet them both, in the flesh. It’s a question of family - there’s the Dubillard family and there is the Duras family, or rather: there’s an irreversible, lasting, immediate and profoundly intimate attachment to the work and the nature of his (personal) relationship with the world; an attachment which moves forward by links: Dubillard before the Internet, with feelings progressing by leaps, by fragments, by bits of memory and feelings, clashes, gridlocks; there is no defined logic governing the work at the beginning, there’s only a feeling that gives rise to the need to write, a flow, no programmed end, a coming and going no matter whence and where, a wealth of exemplary and autonomous points that end up forming a whole, as one would say of the multi-facetted eye of a fly. Dubillard’s work artistically initiates an entire life, mine in particular, but also the lives of the children of the house, those who know today that to act is a game, those who have not forgotten the gardens of childhood.” EV

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“« …OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES. » is my most significant work. It deals with a poet’s doubts who understands that fame is a fake, rigged by the world and civilisation, by his mother, his son, his wife, all the academies. The poet tries to flee this world. Whether town or country, it’s all the same trickery. The title is taken from Rimbaud, and it is meant to say, ‘there is no escape, I’m always there’. It is a piece about water that flows, like life.” ROLAND DUBILLARD

“It is Roland Dubillard’s second masterpiece, after LA MAISON D'OS. A tragicomedy about art, and also about the art of living - the art of being human. This could be what l’ILLUSION COMIQUE is to Corneille's work or THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS to Pirandello's, a fantasy where questions about existence and the necessity of art are mingled in a remarkable, nonconformist writing, which has no equivalent today: a rarity, a treasure. Created in 1972 in Paris for the Autumn Festival by the Renaud-Barrault company, with a prestigious cast including Roland Dubillard himself, and directed by Roger Blin; OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES was revived in 1983 at the TNP by Roger Planchon. For twenty years this drollery had been unjustly absent from theaters.” EV

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For his production Eric Vigner assembles a family of actors the majority of whom had already worked with him before: HÉLÈNE BABU (‘La pluie d'été’), JEAN-DAMIEN BARBIN (‘Rhinocéros’ and ‘La Bête dans la Jungle’), PIERRE GÉRARD (‘La Place Royale’), JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS (‘Marion de Lorme’, ‘Rhinocéros’ and ‘La Bête dans la Jungle’). Four more actors join the ‘Vigner family’: MICHA LESCOT in the part of Félix, the leading role formerly played by Dubillard himself, MARC SUSINI, JEAN-PHILIPPE VIDAL and THIERRY GODARD.

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“I can't write. I've got writer's cramp. Your ballet, your movie, your exploding goats, I don't know, your play, write it yourself. I'm not a pen, or if I'm a pen, take me in hand. I'm not going to lift a finger. It's now, it's right now that I want something to happen, not next season in a theater. Which one? A subsidised one if possible.” ROLAND DUBILLARD, «… OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES.»

« …OÙ BOIVENT LES VACHES. » is played throughout France during the 2004/ 2005 season. In March 2004 Vigner directs ANTIGONA by TRAETTA, his third opera with CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET and the singers MARIA BAYO, MARINA COMPARATO, KOBIE VAN RENSBURG, LAURA POLVERELLI and JOHN MC VEIGH. The opera is created in Montpellier and presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in June 2004. In this project Vigner collaborates with the graphic artists M/M as set designers.

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Whereas STRAVINSKY set the beginning of the myth to music - Oedipus becoming gradually aware of his twofold crime, patricide and incest - TRAETTA focused on the events that follow, inspired by the tragedy of Sophocles. Here, the heroine is Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus.

After the death of Oedipus his sons Eteocles and Polynices agree to rule Thebes for one year in turn, but at the end of the year the former refuses to cede the throne to his brother. When the two brothers kill each other in combat, their uncle Creon ascends the throne. Judging that Polynices has roused a civil war against his fatherland, the new king decrees that he should be denied burial. Defying his authority, Antigone has Polynices incinerated and is condemned to death by Creon. While Sophocles has her buried alive sealed in a cave, Traetta changes the ending significantly: In an act of clemency the tyrant Creon pardons his niece. Traetta’s principal opera is clearly influenced by the philosophy of Enlightenment.

“Antigona was written and composed for Catherine II of Russia, a remarkable political leader and patron of the arts. She used her patronage of the arts and artists to leave her mark on history, a very personal and intimate mark. The Empress is a woman, and the story of Antigone was chosen by design: Antigone is not to die but is pardoned because she acted out of love. The opera begins with the battle between the twins Eteocles and Polynices, who die before Antigone’s and all the world’s eyes. This act of violence triggers developments that are to follow as by way of a ceremonial. In the play, the two brothers’ death is not by accident, it is willed, destined, even desired. As if all that had started with the incestuous crime of Oedipus was to be brought to its conclusion, then and there, in the internecine battle. Their mutual death is an initiation, and the message to Antigone is that the story of her father is to end once and for all. That everyone, everything, has to die so that the new may come. Antigone’s deed was not only done in defiance of Creon’s law, it was to put an end to that law in order for her to join her two brothers in death. To revert to dust, in order to be united with dust of the stars, and the dust of Time. We are made to attend a ceremony of achievement, of “getting there”, on the ruins of the world in an undefined space-time. The ruins of the world only live on as charred signs and their meaning and usefulness must have been understood at one time, while they were still alive.” EV

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“When you listen to Antigona the first thing that comes to mind is the beginning of light, of the black light of cosmic depths, of a perpetual vacillation between black and white. We see projections of star-filled space, luminous memories of Cepheids, an extinguished sun … How can we present Antigone’s tragedy today, when tragedy is rife, surrounds us day and night? This is why I have chosen the graphic artists, M/M, who work in varied fields doing visual art, posters, fashion …, and Paul Quenson as costume designer. They bring to our project their view of the contemporary world. Playing Traetta’s Antigona at this time means taking the audience on a trip of the senses through a universe of signs that enter into a dialogue with their personal histories.” EV

In September 2004, Vigner stages LE JEU DU KWI-JOK or LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME (THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN), after a comedy ballet by MOLIÈRE and LULLY at the Korean National Theatre in Seoul. Immediately thereafter, the Korean artists come to Lorient for five outstanding performances.

The Korean National Theatre is home to several ensembles: ballet, opera, orchestra and the dramatic art. Vigner works with 35 artists from all national disciplines, an event unparalleled in the theater’s history, to make Molière part of their repertory. For the first time Lully’s score is transcribed for traditional Korean instruments.

“Towards the end of 2002 I was invited by the Korean National Theatre to work with their ensemble on the production of a piece by a classic French author. When I saw that the Theatre covered a variety of artistic disciplines I felt that it would be interesting to bring them under one hat. We had just staged Marguerite Duras’s Savannah Bay, with Catherine Samie et Catherine Hiegel, at the Comédie-Française, the “Maison de Molière”. The story of Savannah Bay is set in Southeast Asia, and Savannakhet is the name of a province in Laos. It is the region where Marguerite Duras spent her childhood and had a passionate affair with her Chinese lover. The landscapes discovered in the book entice you to explore them. It seems probable that some time towards the end of the 17th century, a Breton sailor on board the ‘Soleil d’Orient’ put to sea from the commercial port of Lorient to land in Korea after a long voyage along the coastline of China.” EV

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The town of Lorient - L'Orient - was founded in 1666, in the reign of Louis XIV, with the establishment of the French East India Company and the beginnings of trade relations with Asia. The new settlement soon became important when one of France’s proudest vessels was built: the ‘Soleil d’Orient’, a majestic boat armed with 60 cannons, which is supposed to have sunk somewhere off Madagascar; what remained was her name, as the shipyard and the new town were named after her. In 1669 the Sun King commanded Molière and Lully to write a turquerie to make fun of a gardener who had pretended to be an envoy of the Ottoman Empire: LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME.

“LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME is about being different, and also about the future. To the king, the bourgeois, like the Turkish gardener, is simply a laughing matter, but a century later it was the bourgeoisie that was the motive force of the French Revolution. Molière’s works are anything but harmless, and underneath the comedy there is a lot to be learned about history. LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME is the story of a man, still young, married, wealthy, who sets out, for the love of another woman, to discover a world as yet unknown to him, the world of the arts, of music, dancing, poetry, the art of language, the way to dress, the art of fencing, and philosophy, just for the fun of it. Monsieur Jourdain is a man lacking culture who has the means to build, for love, a world in which he becomes engrossed.” EV

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“Molière wrote this piece, in which he played the leading part, at the age of forty. He had loved, become a father, had tasted success. Now his message is that love can work a transformation in man. In France Monsieur Jourdain tends to appear somewhat moth-eaten, he is a ridiculous figure, old and grey. As I see him he is a man who loves to the extent of self-effacement.” EV

„ Marquise, your lovely eyes make me die of love.” THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN, Act 2, Scene 4

- I am in love with a lady of great rank and quality, and wish to ask your help in writing her a note which I intend to drop most casually at her feet. - Do you want to write in verse ? - Not in verse. - You only want prose ? - No, neither prose nor verse. - It must be one of them. - Why ? - Because any expression is either verse or prose.

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- There's only prose and verse? - What isn't verse is prose, and what's not prose is verse. - So when I say: "Nicole bring me my slippers" is that prose? THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN, Act 2, Scene 4

“To begin with we shall learn about the letters and their pronunciation.” THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN, Act 2, Scene 4

“Monsieur Jourdain still speaks prose without being aware that it is prose, this time in Korean language with french overhead-titles. Traditional costumes of luscious beauty, a stage décor resplendent in oriental lacquer… to Lully’s music adapted for traditional Korean instruments, the ballet dancers inspired by an ancient culture - where each gesture, each movement of the hand has a significance of its own - and the breathtaking synchronicity of the interaction between the individual parts of the ensemble would without any doubt have sent some chills down the spine of Louis XIV. The spectacle is complete and the enchantment unique.” BERNARD BABKINE (MADAME FIGARO, 16 September 2006)

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“When I first arrived at Seoul I was entranced by the discovery of the music, dance and songs of a very ancient culture very much alive, completely new to me. Some of it was folklore, some of it aristocratic. You have to hear the music of Lully played on old Korean instruments! On my first, preparatory visit, I remember, I once took the underground: the tune that indicated that the doors were about to be closed was exactly the melody that opens the Turkish ceremony in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. A coincidence? I’m not so sure. A signal, as likely as not. Sheer courtesy required that what we had achieved in South Korea should be brought back to France and in particular to Lorient, the place whose name and history stimulated our imagination and made us embark on our project: From Lorient to the Orient.” EV

On stage, an amorous white peacock displays his splendid feathers. The Korean artist EUNJI PEIGNARD-KIM, who has been living in Lorient for some ten years, creates the floor painting for Eric Vigner’s mise en scène in black-stone technique.

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LE JEU DU KWI-JOK or LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME is awarded the Prix Culturel France/Corée 2004. It forms the theatrical highlight of the 120-year celebration of the Franco-Korean Friendship in 2006 and is on this occasion again presented in France: at the Opéra Comique in Paris in September, and the Quartz Theater in Brest in October.

“Eric Vigner transports the onlooker from one enchantment to the next. The spectacle is everywhere: in Lully’s music so wondrously transformed by the use of traditional local instruments, the singing and the breathtaking dances of Korea’s leading artists, in the costumes of precious moiré silk and the screens decorated with peacock feathers. As the ardent young man that plays Monsieur Jourdain appears on stage, one is joyfully convinced that this ‘Bourgeois Gentleman’ has at long last risen from the limbo of the past. ” MAGUELONE BONNAUD (LE PARISIEN, 18 September 2006)

“The play is no longer a farce that holds superficial erudition up to ridicule – it is a play with mirrors that confront eras and continents with each other. In Eric Vigner’s mise en scène with the artists of the South Korean National Theatre, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme becomes a supernatural experience.” MATHILDE LA BARDONNIE (LIBÉRATION, 26 September 2006)

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In December 2004, Vigner designs the sets for PLACE DES HÉROS by THOMAS BERNHARD, directed by ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL, for the entrance of the Austrian author into the repertory of the Comédie-Française. Vigner for the first time designs a set for another stage director. The style is unmistakeably his own: his characteristic use of space, a décor that is anything but realistic and leads us into the realm of painting.

Inspired by the Viennese avant-garde movement Wiener Werkstätte and his intimate knowledge of the city, he chooses dark colours inherent in this ‘testamentary’ work in Bernhard’s oeuvre - death, the Book, religion. The open space blends into an eerie negative of a building by Hoffmann, one of the members of Wiener Werkstätte, a fitting vessel for the music of Thomas Bernhard’s language.

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“The theatre is a timeframe where phantoms come to life.” EV

“Work on the curtain as both an object and a - surmountable or insurmountable - border constituted a quest for theatrical means of expression, as it did in the case of the bamboo curtain for LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE or the one made of thousands of multicoloured glass beads for SAVANNAH BAY. The setting I designed for Bernhard’s PLACE DES HÉROS was conceived in this continuity. Actually, my work again and again explores the same questions: what means do I have to use to pass through images to the innermost heart of things? How can I turn a text into architecture? How can I make a text theatre? How does one build a living body out of the text, and how can one involve the listening spectator in the very process that goes on on stage? How can one come to grips with all the stories, all the situations, all the images that are elicited by the text?” EV

PLACE DES HÉROS is presented by the CDDB [Grand Théâtre] in Lorient in April 2005.

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• 1996-2006 • 10th anniversary of the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient, Centre Dramatique National de Bretagne Once upon a time - already ten years! In 1993, Marguerite Duras came to see LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ (SUMMERRRAIN), put on stage by Eric Vigner. She loved the work and offered him the scenario of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. While the play was touring Russia, Vigner was appointed by the Ministry of Culture to direct the Centre Dramatique de Lorient.

“All geographic names, exotic and musical as they are by their very nature, are capable of conjuring up an imaginary map of the world. So, when we were called by ‘L’Orient’, we accepted. We left Russia, where new life was stirring after the winter frost, and went to the place called Lorient. ‘Lo and behold, I enter the fields, gigantic palaces of the memory.’ Before us lies the biggest submarine base of the Atlantic Wall. So, there we are. The place bespeaks the story of a first love, the love for a German soldier who was to die on the day of liberation, the eternal theme of love between enemies, the memory of the destroyed town - in HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR - in Lorient - and of the Orient deeply embedded in this cities memory. The place recommends itself as a possible performance venue. All that happened ten years ago. Since then, the theatre has seen the emergence of many artists, and has given them a home. In the heart of Lorient, at the very site where a big air-bomb was found, a new spacious theatre has been built, and over these ten years time has continued its work.” BÉNÉDICTE VIGNER

Ten years ago also occurred the death of Marguerite Duras, ten years during which Vigner kept exploring her works (reading of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR with Valérie Dréville, LA DOULEUR with Anne Brochet and Bénédicte Vigner, staging of LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE and SAVANNAH BAY, as the first Duras play to be added to the repertory of the Comédie-Française). On the occasion of the ten-year celebration of the CDDB, Vigner reverts to the present he had received at the hands of Marguerite Duras: the scenario of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. He reassociates the scenario to the text that had been seminal to his early work, LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ and thus presents PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA.

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THE CARMELITE CLOISTER FOR MARGUERITE Since 1967 the cloister adjoining the fourteenth-century Carmelite Church has been used for performances of the Avignon Festival - always in the traditional way, with the public facing the stage. When looking for possible locations, Vigner was intrigued by the cloister as an architectural space that invited meditation, by its ‘striving towards the heavens’. His arrangement, then, for this year’s festival constitutes a first.

“I wanted to place the audience in the architecture, the body of the writing.

When you put people just in front of whatever takes place on the stage, you

most of the time confront them with ideas. If I decided some time ago to

devote myself to what is commonly called mise-en-scène, I did so because I

wanted to try to physically involve the public in the process, so that they

would become sensitive to what the creative process of writing generates. I

do theatre on the basis of the imaginative force of text, a process which is

close to poetry.” EV

“One might say that the text is the house. The house, that’s the book, it is what is written. And it is in that house that I develop my mise-en-scène, word for word, step by step.” MARGUERITE DURAS (The colour of words, in conversation with Dominique Noguez)

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PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA • 60th Festival of Avignon • July 2006 •

with HÉLÈNE BABU (La Pluie d’été 1993, «…Où boivent les vaches.» 2003), BÉNÉDICTE CERUTTI, THIERRY GODARD («…Où boivent les vaches.» 2003) NICOLAS MARCHAND, MARIE-ÉLÉONORE POURTOIS, THOMAS SCIMECA, ATSURO WATABE and JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS ( Marion De Lorme 1998, Rhinocéros 2000, La Bête dans la Jungle 2001, «…Où boivent les vaches.» 2003). Prior to Avignon, the CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient presented the play at its Grand Théâtre in a setting designed to anticipate the performance at the Carmelite Cloister. What Marguerite Duras has left us also is her capacity to revert again and again to, and to rework, her own œuvre and to leave her works to posterity as just one option among many others. Her writings have taken the form of books, novels, theatre plays, film scenarios, films… She is no longer, but her works pursue their course and engender new ones. This is also the reason why Vigner involves the graphic artists M/M in this endeavour: they, too, constantly rework their own graphic œuvre as something to be renewed and recirculated. With them, Vigner gives rise to a new form of art in which three textual levels communicate with each other - the writing, its staging, and its continuous visual unfolding.

“At that point in his life Ernesto was supposed not to be able to read, but he said he’d read some of the burned book. Just like that, he said, without thinking about it, without even knowing what he was doing. And then - well, then he stopped bothering whether he was really reading or not, or even what reading was - whether it was this or something else. At first, he said, he’d tried like this: he took the shape of a word and quite arbitrarily gave it a provisional meaning. Then he gave the next word another meaning, but in terms of the assumed provisional meaning of the first word. And he went on like that until the whole sentence yielded some sense. In this way he came to see that reading was a kind of continuous unfolding within his own body of a story invented by himself.” MARGUERITE DURAS, LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ

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In his PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA, Vigner invites his audience to join him on a voyage through Marguerite Duras’ œuvre - through two works, in particular, that count among the writer’s finest pages. Love, death, desire, memory and oblivion are the themes that traverse, from one tale to the other, one and the same writing.

“Marguerite Duras’ œuvre constitutes one whole. A whole made up of different periods that may be more or less abstract, droll, concrete, tragic. But each of them is linked with and refers to all the others and vice versa. The heroes of her stories respond from one book to another.” EV

“The task of the actors and of the director is to deeply rely on the writing, in order to attain and transmit to the audience feelings on which the text is based. The theatre has always to do with the question of how to give presence to a text, and the works of Duras make this question all the more evident and inescapable.” EV

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“At the end of LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ, Ernesto, the child who discovers Ecclesiastes even though he has never learnt to read, ‘becomes a brilliant young professor of mathematics and than a scientist. First he was offered a job in America, then others all over the world, wherever there was a big scientific center.’ The family breaks apart, and from its ruins, right from the flames kindled in the ruins of LA PLUIE D’ÉTÉ, ultimately rises the magnificent woman who hears a voice tell her ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.’” EV

“And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire; and he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, and cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth; and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer.” REVELATION OF ST. JOHN, THE ANGEL AND THE LITTLE BOOK 10,1-11

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“Living means, on an individual level, to connect present and past - but also that present and past form a whole, because they touch each other in one point. And what is the present if not exactly that touching?” BERNARD NOËL, LA CASTRATION MENTALE

Time will pass. Nothing but time. And time will come. Time is coming. When we shall not know how to name what will unite us. The name will vanish little by little from our memory. Then, it will disappear completely. MARGUERITE DURAS, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

After the Avignon Festival, PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA tours France during the 2006/07 season, notably at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, the Quartz in Brest et the TNT in Toulouse.

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On 10 October 2006, Vigner presents JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE (TILL DEATH US DO PART) by RÉMI DE VOS with CATHERINE JACOB, MICHA LESCOT (« …Où boivent les vaches. » 2003) and CLAUDE PERRON.

“I always start from the text, the story as such isn’t enough. I base my stage direction on a writing in the essence of which I can recognise myself … a way of breathing, a way of thinking, a sensibility, a special energy, some movement, that is what I want to share with others, as if I were giving a book to a friend.” EV

JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE is a black comedy for three truly infernal actors. It is also the story of a family, of a son who returns to his mother’s home with an urn that contains the ashes of his grandmother who has just been incinerated. This fairly tragic moment is the starting point for a comic action that unfolds inexorably with clockwork precision.

“On the occasion of his grandmother’s death a man meets his mother again, whom he has not seen for several years. The meeting is not without problems, but it is also an occasion for him to see his early love again, whom he has never forgotten. Despite the hard words mother and son have for each other and an incident which might easily spoil it all, they ultimately reconcile. The play speaks of love, death and time as it passes inexorably (what else could it do, if you come to think of it?). It also speaks of lies, of hate, of longing and of madness - and many other things, which I just cannot recall. Ten years ago it was Eric who produced my first text and, in so doing, launched me on the road to become a playwright. So it is possible, after all, to meet with durable friendship. In today’s world of theatre, this really means a lot. And it urges one to go on writing. RÉMI DE VOS

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The aesthetics of the play is that of a boulevard comedy, very direct, and also of the nineteen sixties or eighties, inspired by American architecture with such things as orange wall-to-wall carpeting, straight lines, large picture windows, Venetian blinds and imitation stone walls.

“I was looking for a new form that would match this new way of writing. I did not want anything like a realistic setting, there is no décor for you to lean on, there are no walls. It is a space created for a specific purpose - or one no longer in use. The spectators cannot say whether they are there just before the performance is to start, or whether the play is over. Nor can one say whether what they see exists or doesn’t exist at all.” EV

“I love these tragicomical stories very much, stories that leave you to a delicate equilibrium.” EV

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His grandmother’s death causes Simon to return to his childhood home. But the mournful ceremony turns into a nightmare when the urn containing the ashes slips from his hands.

“Recalling stylistic elements of pop culture and the shrill aesthetics of the seventies, the living room with its carpeted steps and the immense picture window giving onto a prospect made up of a tall stone wall, Eric Vigner’s décor is a jewel of humorous stage design.” PATRICK SOURD (LES INROCKUPTIBLES, January 9th, 2007)

Madeleine - Why did he give you the urn! Anne - Why he gave it to me ? Simon - The urn. Anne - The urn? Simon - If you please. Anne looks at Simon. Anne - If you please what?? Madeleine - But this is something after all! I want to know why he gave it to you. Anne looks at Madeleine. Anne - Because we were going to get married. Simon looks at Anne. Madeleine - Good Lord.

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On the mobile phone. Simon - I am still at my mother’s. I am getting married. Her name is Anne. Provincial middle class family, her father is a building contractor. It happened all of a sudden. Loads of emotion. My mother and wife are quite well. Call me if there’s a problem at the office. RÉMI DE VOS, JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE

“When meeting his mother again, Simon finds himself confronted with a numbed, frozen world from which there is no escaping. Trapped, this young man, who succeeded outside his former home, leaves messages on the answering machine of his office colleagues as a shipwrecked might toss bottles into the sea. He is physically fettered, tied to the lineage of women around him, and his mobile is his only hope. Simon returns to his origins, into the womb as it were. To save himself he invents a story - a situation he had always been careful to avoid. As in a Pinter play, what one sees is only the bubbles that rise from the bottom of the sea, the tip of the iceberg. What is below the water line is for the spectator to reconstruct.” EV

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“I think I would be unable to write anything but theatre. I have a problem whenever I have to take sides, to represent only one point of view. I am paradoxical by nature - I simply cannot make any statement without feeling the opposite of what I say would be equally true. That’s why I like writing for the stage, which allows me to hide behind different characters, to explore all the possibilities inherent in a set of problems. My plays are written literally line after line. They put off to sea from their point of departure to travel to an unknown destination. In this way I have learnt to let myself be guided by my inspiration, to obey my instinct and the subconscious that serves as guide to my imagination.” RÉMI DE VOS

For his text of JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE, Rémi De Vos was awarded the Prix Théâtre 2006 of the Fondation Diane et Lucien Barrière, which was handed to him on the occasion of the performances at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris in January 2007.

In the spring of 2007, Vigner was invited to Albania. The National Theatre of Tirana had been inaugurated on April 23, 1945, with Marcel Pagnol’s TOPAZE. The theatre attributed an important role to French dramatists right from its beginning. French culture and the French language have a privileged standing in Albania.

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Although the play had been translated into Albanian, THE BARBER OF SEVILLE had never been put on stage there. VIGNER accepted the invitation by the National Theatre, the first to be accorded to a French director, and chose this pre-Revolution play for the Albanian ensemble.

In the course of several trips to Tirana, VIGNER acquainted himself with the ensemble of actors, polyphonic chants, traditional costumes and the iconographic heritage of the MARUBI family of photographers.

April 19, 2007 saw the first performance of THE BARBER OF SEVILLE by BEAUMARCHAIS, with the Albanian actors ROLAND TREBICKA, LUIZA XHUVANI, HELIDON FINO, NERITAN LIÇAJ, MARKO BITRAKU et FADIL KUJOFSA. VIGNER’s THE BARBER OF SEVILLE was awarded the Prize of the International Festival of Butrint, toured the Balkan countries in 2007/2008 and will be presented in Lorient April 2010 (more about this creation page 93-98).

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In 2002 VIGNER had presented LA BÊTE DANS LA JUNGLE by Marguerite DURAS at the L’Espace Go in Montréal. He intended the play to form the first part of a diptych the second part of which was to be SAVANNAH BAY, which he directed at the same time at the Comédie-Française. In France, SAVANNAH BAY was all the more important since it was the first time that DURAS was performed at the Comédie-Française. VIGNER felt it was high time for that venerable institution to admit DURAS, whose dramatic work had often been shunned, to the Pantheon of France’s greatest dramatic authors. On September 4, 2007 he re-staged MARGUERITE DURAS’ SAVANNAH BAY with two outstanding actresses from Quebec - FRANÇOISE FAUCHER, a Frenchwoman who had lived in Quebec for more than forty years, and MARIE-FRANCE LAMBERT. VIGNER made the Montreal audience witness the process in which he himself had been locked in the course of an intensive dialogue for years. What he tried to achieve was to make the stage a personal projection screen for the audience.

“The spectators watching a play by DURAS write their very own intimate history, which belongs to nobody but themselves. This is why the dramatic work of DURAS is poetical theatre, is more than theatre that merely presents one point of view, for example a socio-political one. It encompasses all the various points of view without giving one of them preference over the others.” EV

“Duras helped me find the kind of theatre that I wanted to make. I discovered a dramatic approach which was new and as yet unexplored, and which presented me with many different options for inventing a theatre of the 21st century. Like everybody else, I had the same misgivings initially, the same prejudices. But then, the confrontation with her œuvre laid the foundations for the kind of theatre I had longed to make. For me, DURAS is a source of everything, a text and a writing process that help me put things on stage.” EV

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Written in 1995, DÉBRAYAGE (walkout), the first play by RÉMI DE VOS, is a comedy made up of sketches - most of them funny, all of them cruel. Twenty-three characters let loose in the city meet with situations that throw them into deep crisis. What they all have in common is the fear of abandonment, often because they are out of a job, which many, if not all, of them see as the only existential value remaining. In June 2007 VIGNER chose DÉBRAYAGE for the graduation of fifteen young actors from La Manufacture, Haute École de Théâtre de Suisse romande (the School of Dramatic Art of Francophone Switzerland at La Chaux-de-Fonds). The play’s French tour began at Lorient on October 9, 2007.

“This is like musical chairs below a metaphysical heaven. Without support, these characters, archetypes of modern man in an urban setting, tumble down into the abyss, and as they fall they talk, or rather shout, in a clear, unrestrained language in order to save themselves. RÉMI DE VOS’ text is that of a poet. He does not preoccupy himself with the sordid aspects of the world, nor with a socio-political - or merely political - analysis of its inevitable decline. What he writes is simply an expression of his feelings about a world that has seen its day, of his innermost sentiments, a far cry from any sort of nihilism. What is so new about it is that we laugh as we invent our contemporary truth.” EV

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“I think it is wrong to say that Marx is dead. Of course he has died, there’s no denying it, and a six-year-old child can see that he is dead if you tell him that he was born 150 years ago, that he was just an ordinary man etc. So far so good. […] God - we don’t even know if he was born. Marx is dead, we say, that’s quite all right if you want to insist on it, but we know at least that he was born, that’s undeniable, and that’s clearly a good thing, because we don’t have to ask ourselves all the time, ‘But are you sure that he did say that, are you sure that Marx actually existed?’ or something like that. Hey, guys! I say all this just for argument’s sake.” RÉMI DE VOS, DÉBRAYAGE

“Rémi DE VOS is a fast thinker. What he produces is neither reasoning nor reflection, it is simply logorrhoea. Make sure that what you say is out of the ordinary. If it turns into a dialogue there’s something one does not understand. Follow the rhythm of the phrase, don’t run ahead or lag behind. Follow the words closely, word for word – and you will move forward.” Florilège EV

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“When I wrote DÉBRAYAGE, sometimes I came across a newspaper article that caught my attention. There was, for instance, a report about an amusement park that had been opened in Lorraine, formerly a centre of the iron and steel industry, now a down-at-heel region marked by mass unemployment, and that the workers had found new jobs in which they had to masquerade as smurfs. I simply had to write a passage about this. But that is nearly all there is to it… My literary tastes had little to do with the subject that I had set out to treat. I had read a lot of BECKETT, KAFKA, Fernando PESSOA... I remembered from BECKETT that ‘nothing is funnier than misery’, and from KAFKA the undeniably comic aspect of a man caught in the snares of an all-powerful and inhuman administration. PESSOA’s “The Book of Disquiet” moved me deeply because he wrote about a clerk trying to get out of the mediocrity of his life by writing, by dedicating himself to his inner self, by simply contemplating living beings and things. I had a very similar life... These are the three great writers I read at the time, and that I still read today. They have clearly influenced me greatly, but under cover.” RÉMI DE VOS

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“If DE VOS’ writings are radical, VIGNER’s art is cardinal – a Divine Comedy in which the work contract replaces the work of the contract, where contractual relations are a delusion, and where comedy – as in the works of Shakespeare that so fascinated MARX – becomes engaged in a dialectic relationship with tragedy. DÉBRAYAGE is a spectral and spectacular spectacle which confuses, stimulates, cheers and alarms – a rare spectacle, frozen time racing by at top speed, an aesthetics of emotion.” STÉPHANE PATRICE

In July 2008 VIGNER reinvested the Carmelite Cloister for the Festival of Avignon, two years after PLUIE D’ÉTÉ À HIROSHIMA. This time he realized the set design for ORDET by KAJ MUNK, directed by ARTHUR NAUZYCIEL. ORDET (the word) is the story of a miracle, a resurrection, of which CARL THEODOR DREYER has made a cinematrographic masterpiece.

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For the set design of ORDET, ERIC VIGNER created a pulsation of light, a panoramic vision the smooth, suggestive shapes of which embrace the actors. Human nature is enclosed in an atmosphere which recalls nordic landscapes of ice and water. An elemental encounter of form and material invites the audience to dive into an archaic universe, to see the words act. In April 2008, VIGNER directed he world premiere of the American translation of IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS by BERNARD-MARIE KOLTÈS at the 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta, with the American actors DEL HAMILTON and ISMA'IL IBN CONNER. IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS is the first of a cycle of new translations of KOLTÈS plays by ISMA'IL IBN CONNER in the frame of the U.S. KOLTÈS PROJECT, one of the most significant artistic partnerships between France and the U.S. in the field of contemporary theatre.

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“If you walk outside, at this hour and in this place, it’s because you desire something which you do not have, and this thing, me, I can provide it for you; because if I was at this place long before you and will be here long after you, and if at this very hour the savage relationship between men and animals doesn’t chase me away, it’s because I have what’s necessary to satisfy the desire which passes in front of me; it’s like a weight which I need to get rid of on whomever, man or animal, who passes in front of me.” BERNARD-MARIE KOLTÈS, IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS Translated by ISMA'IL IBN CONNER “Forty years after the assassination of MARTIN LUTHER KING (April 4, 1968), VIGNER's mise-en-scène de-emphasizes the location and focuses on the history - or rather, the histories of BMK and MLK - and makes all the world the stage (theatrum mundi), calling in question the world and the dividing lines between individuals and peoples, dividing lines that still exist after the advent of civil rights, the end of segregation, or apartheid, in the United States and indeed all over the world.” STÉPHANE PATRICE, KOLTÈS SUBVERSIF, Descartes & Cie 2008

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“The play takes a wordless meeting between two men and puts it under a magnifying glass, the technique comparable to a frame-by-frame analysis of a short but significant piece of film. SOLITUDE's approach to minute details and internal monologues echoes stream-of-consciousness novelists such as JAMES JOYCE and VIRGINIA WOOLF, as well as contemporary miniaturists such as NICHOLSON BAKER. A writer looking at the interaction between two people could find a wealth of material in an attached couple's loving relationship, or a death struggle between two soldiers on a battlefield.” CURT HOLMAN, Creative Loafing Atlanta

“Two men who cross don’t have any other choice but to strike out at each other, with the violence of an enemy or the gentleness of a brother.” BERNARD-MARIE KOLTÈS, IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS Translated by ISMA'IL IBN CONNER

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“For THE SOLITUDE with American actors in Atlanta, ÉRIC VIGNER designed lines on the stage floor which recall a boxing ring. KOLTÈS’ language seemed enriched by the new American translation. ISMA' IL IBN CONNER, the actor-translator who interpreted the dealer, spoke the text in a very rhythmical way. He walks on a sort of borderline which the text talks about, between poetical height and trivial offense. Listening to the incantatory strength of the American language one can’t forget that KOLTÈS always said that he wanted to write for actors such as ROBERT DE NIRO. The confrontation recalls a street battle - a rhetorically emphasized provocation. ÉRIC VIGNER conjured up the black American mythology by transposing the text into musical beat. We can suddenly imagine the client’s death as well as his reawakening.” SERGE SAADA, Alternatives Théâtrales, 1er trimestre 2010

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Octobre 6, 2008 VIGNER opened the season of the CDDB in Lorient with SHAKESPEARE’s OTHELLO, which he translated and adapted for the stage in collaboration with the french playwright RÉMI DE VOS (with the actors : BÉNÉDICTE CERUTTI, MICHEL FAU, SAMIR GUESMI, NICOLAS MARCHAND, VINCENT NÉMETH, AURÉLIEN PATOUILLARD, THOMAS SCIMECA, CATHERINE TRAVELLETTI et JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS). OTHELLO went on tour in France and was notably presented at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris.

“I am writing to you from Atlanta, spring 2008, where I just started to rehearse IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS by BERNARD-MARIE KOLTÈS. Before I came here, RÉMI DE VOS and I finished translating and adapting OTHELLO for our project. Six months of hard work, from the English into the French, in the intention to be close to SHAKESPEARE and to the actors. From KOLTÈS to SHAKESPEARE, while reassociating languages, I do again read OTHELLO in the shadow of THE SOLITUDE : "Two men who cross don’t have any other choice but to strike out at each other, with the violence of an enemy or the gentleness of a brother. And if they choose at the end, in the desert-like atmosphere of this hour, to evoke what’s not there, from the past, or a dream, or out of lack, it’s because there isn’t, between them, much strangeness. When facing a mystery, it’s advisable to open, and to reveal yourself, entirely, in order to force the mystery, in turn, to reveal itself. " - B.-M. KOLTÈS.” EV “What is happening in the play surpasses jealousy. For me, the principal couple is formed by Iago and Othello. They both are vigorous, pursue a career and share hopes... And then their ways part : Othello continues to rise up and Iago's suit to become his lieutenant is turned down - by Othello. The curtain rises after that particular incident. Iago, so far an ordinary man, transforms himself instantaneously, and I believe in an immediate metamorphosis. Hurt by what he feels injustice, this ordinary man, in a fraction of a second, singles out an inner calling, as mediocre as evil can be... Othello, he is "great of heart", and Iago will destroy that greatness. Iago also becomes the dramaturgic engine that Othello uses in order to move on. Othello uses Iago - maybe unconsciously, blindly - as if he wanted to go on a road of non - return... It's an intuition, but I have the feeling that Othello and Iago need each other.” EV

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“Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago : In following him, I follow but myself. Heaven is my judge, not for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end : For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ‘tis not long after, But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at – I am not what I am.” OTHELLO, SHAKESPEARE, Act I, scene 1

“DURAS, I have worked on for years, she was fascinated by certain passionate crimes, the state of rapture they brought to light. I have the impression that Othello seeks a sort of enlightenment. Iago poisons Othello, that's right, he infects him with the doubt. But he chooses exactly the poison to which Othello will respond. In the third act this is coming out very clearly. Othello is the one who is asking, he pushes Iago to speak, and to speak on - as if he were asking for an even stronger dose... Yes, Iago is the diabolic operator of this revelation... But beyond his infernal action, there is a dimension he can't control. Othello doesn't yet measure unconditional love. He feels it, guesses its unreserved extent, but he doesn't see. As if he chose darkness in order to find the light.” EV

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“The play deals with "seeing" - a desire to see, an incapability, an impossibility to see. It's a paradox play, at any moment... if Othello doesn't want to see that Iago is deceiving him, than maybe because he wants to see something else. There is a dark side in him, like the blind spot we all have in our eyes. He searches for a revelation, something which has to do with his proper origins and the highest form of love, the unconditional...” EV

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AN OPERA MADE OF WORDS “The set design reminds us that ÉRIC VIGNER was a visual artist before he became a director, and this time the visual artist surpasses the actors’ director. Those high mobile panels, those perforations which change their colour according to the lighting, VIGNER uses them with rare intelligence, in opposing black to white, empty space to scenic machinery, and then, when he "turns the colour on", he gives them such a strength as to feed and infiltrate his actors. During their arrival in Cyprus (act II), where the background of the stage gives way to a cerulean blue which is reflected on the gleaming ground of ebony, the light design by JOËL HOURBEIGT makes us assist to a magic dawn which RIMBAUD would not have been able to describe. We drown ourselves in the most beautiful picture which ROTHKO could have painted. The actors’ silhouettes, like Chinese shadows or frail puppets get loose on this firmament of azure, announcing the end of the war. One moment of grace in a world which will soon sink into darkness. MAETERLINCK considered that the big poems of humanity - such as OTHELLO or MACBETH - were not intended for the stage, that the poem was a piece of art that stood in contradiction with the representation. "Any masterpiece is a symbol, and the symbol never bears the active human presence. It would be necessary to completely make us forget the human presence on stage." Thus ÉRIC VIGNER, by assimilating the actors to his set, allows to make forget the presence of man; the " total eclipse of the sun and the moon " takes place, black and white became allies, and it is not the "terror" which was engendered, but the harmony of refined aesthetics, where man sublimated his own nature.” OLIVIER DHÉNIN, LES TROIS COUPS, 14 novembre 2008

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“The famous Handkerchief is a major component: ÉRIC VIGNER, director, set and costume designer, takes a hold of the silky rectangular metaphor, Othello’s very precious object which Iago stole from Desdemone. The image of the handkerchief - folding and unfolding - takes shape in moving panels of barbary drawings, in shadows which recall the skyscrapers of some financial Cities where thousand windows are lit up in the night of terrorists. A translucent bright blue sky opens the living chess game. The game takes place on a black disc, with the king, queens and sculptured soldiers, unpredictable shadows in black and white, dressed in the heavy furs of sovereigns. Two maritime bridges evoke the power of a past Venetian fleet, and thus question the supremacy of a Western world in bad shape. An OTHELLO perfectly up-to-date.” VÉRONIQUE HOTTE, LA TERRASSE, 5 novembre 2008

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“Soft you ; a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service and they know’t : No more of that. I pray you in your letters When you shall these unlucky deeds relate Speak of me as I am : nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well…” OTHELLO, SHAKESPEARE, Act V, scene 2

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“There is a rise and a fall. One bright side and one dark side. The set I imagined shows both sides - one side is always the reverse of the other. We travel from black to white, from white to black. There are many different ways to provoke blindness, the darkness as well as a dazzling light....” EV

It was on the coast of Albania, a country bathed by the Adriatic Sea, that ERIC VIGNER dropped his anchor in April 2007 (introduction page 76-77). In Tirana precisely, its capital city founded in 1614 by the Ottoman general SULEJMAN PASHA. Today the country reveals itself after 50 years of tyranny. He was invited to work with the actors of the National Theater and to discover Albania, the mountains where the women dress in black, the seashore where the fishermen sing polyphonies and the city of Shkodra with Albania’s photographic treasure of the MARUBIs, three generations of photographers who took staged pictures of the Ottoman Albania…

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Inspired especially by one photograph, ERIC VIGNER decided to adapt THE BARBER OF SEVILLE for the National Theater of Tirana and to put into resonance BEAUMARCHAIS’ Figaro - as a popular character prefiguring the French Revolution - and the history of Albania.

“In this black and white photograph, we can first look at what it represents : two Albanian officers are sitting at a table, they are wearing the traditional white skirts, the vests, their positions are like a mirror image, they are posing in front of a painted background. One can imagine that they are twins, or friends, brothers maybe. We can also look at this picture differently - its composition, its contrasts, the lights and the shadows, its Rorschach-like symmetry.” EV

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VIGNER directed in different languages, in Korean THE BOURGEOIS GENTLEMAN by MOLIÈRE (Seoul, Lorient 2004/Paris, Brest 2006), in Albanian THE BARBER OF SEVILLE by BEAUMARCHAIS (Tirana 2007, Lorient 2010), in American IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS by KOLTÈS (Atlanta 2008). The CDDB becomes a theatrical anchorage point for VIGNER’s creations abroad: BERBERI I SEVILJES (THE BARBER OF SEVILLE) created 2007 in Tirana was presented for the first time to the French public in April 2010, in the center of the event DE LORIENT À L’ORIENT 2010.

“THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS and OTHELLO follow each other, they communicate. THE BARBER is the comedy of jealousy and OTHELLO is the tragedy of jealousy. THE SOLITUDE is somewhere in between. All of these plays have to do with a blind spot and a paradox. Bartholo’s negation of the outside world in THE BARBER, the client’s negation of desire in THE SOLITUDE which results in proposing the ultimate weapon, and finally Othello’s blind spot which drives him to kill the object he loves. From THE BARBER to OTHELLO, the black hole extends and absorbs the narrative.“ EV

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BARTHOLO. What paper is that in your hand ? ROSINE. Some verses of a song called “The useless Precaution” which my singing master gave me yesterday. BARTHOLO. “The useless Precaution”, what’s that ? ROSINE. It’s a new play. BARTHOLO. Something dramatic ! Some new piece of folly ! What an ignorant Age we live in !... ROSINE. You are always finding fault with the poor Age we live in. BARTHOLO. I beg Pardon for taking so much liberty, but pray what has it produced ? A Variety of Follies, Free-thinking, Electricity, Attraction, Toleration, Inoculation, the Encyclopedy, and loads of nonsensical Plays. THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, Act I, Scene III

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“A Venetian blind - "jealousy" in French - is an element of architecture (or a certain state of mind in French) which allows to see without being seen. It serves to change the vision : to alter light and shadow, the inside and the outside. For THE BARBER, I worked on a magnified lace, on perforations, black holes, the void, the unfolding of the creative process of the story. A multitude of variations and possible points of view.” EV

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“The theater which I am interested in develops a form for the spectator to project himself into, to reinvent himself. For me, theater is not a place to come to in order to get answers, but a place where it is possible to revisit stories, our stories, the intimate, forgotten ones - in fact an unfamiliar place which the spectator can enter. Theater needs to carry in itself its counterpart, its paradox : "to be or not to be", to be one thing and at the same time something else. For example, when CÉZANNE paints apples and says "It is with an apple that I want to amaze Paris", his subject is not the apple. His subject is painting. The same goes for theater. It is not the story we are actually attached to, but the theater itself.” EV

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SEXTETT, created in October 2009 at the CDDB in Lorient, was ERIC VIGNER’s fourth collaboration with the playwright RÉMI DE VOS, after JUSQU’À CE QUE LA MORT NOUS SÉPARE (Till death us do part) in 2006, DÉBRAYAGE (walkout) in 2007 and OTHELLO in 2008. RÉMI DE VOS had been assigned to write SEXTETT for these 6 particular actors, more precisely for 1 actor : MICHA LESCOT in close contact with 5 actresses, 5 women of different cultural backgrounds : ANNE-MARIE CADIEUX and MARIE-FRANCE LAMBERT from Quebec, MARIA DE MEDEIROS from Portugal, JUTTA JOHANNA WEISS from Vienna, and the French actress JOHANNA NIZARD.

SEXTETT WARNING As the title explicitly indicates The play talks about… music Quite contrary to some common ideas Music doesn’t always cool down the temper Sometimes it makes the blood run wild And drives to blackouts It was by listening to the children's choirs That GILLES DE RAIS forgot Jeanne SEXTETT addresses itself to seasoned music lovers. RÉMI DE VOS

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“SEXTETT is the continuation of a work and an artistic friendship between Rémi and myself. Many fascinating adventures in the history of theater took place because an author and a director met. In theater, one cannot dissociate essence and form. The director, knowingly or not, gives a form to the writing. Directing is a form of writing - on the stage. And it is related to other art forms such as the visual arts, music... The writing takes shape in 3D, in the time-space of the performance in order to produce theater in the "here and now". With SEXTETT, we wanted to create for these actors in particular. I invited Rémi to my home in Brittany to write. We talked a lot. We walked by the sea. We wanted to produce something new together, to testify in our ways to today’s desire in theater.” EV

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“Didn’t VIGNER, DE VOS and LESCOT invent a new genre, the theatrical serial ? The continuity of a project where the story unfolds from one play to the next, in the same set, where we can follow the psycho-erotic education of a very contemporary young man ? Yes, they did. And precisely with the art of fantasy…” EMMANUELLE BOUCHEZ, Télérama, 17 octobre 2009

“RÉMI DE VOS assumes the totally surrealistic universe in which he loves to develop his characters and director-accomplice ERIC VIGNER particularly treasured his players. The chosen tone allows to disconnect from reality and masterly integrates musical passages. This opus on Simon's way to become a man was specifically written for MICHA LESCOT and totally innovates the issue, his performance was simply remarkable.” DIMITRI DENORME, Pariscope, 28 octobre 2009

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“ÉRIC VIGNER gives his favorite young actor the opportunity to reinvent the fortuitous encounter of Eros and Thanatos. In the role of Simon, MICHA LESCOT hardly withstands the appeal of a compelling female quintet in heat which will detonate a choral debauch on Simon’s ancestry. DE VOS provokes the appetite of five female characters, a face-to-face with animosity, a sexual volte-face… where a dog-woman named Walkyrie leads on the pack. In between singers intoning and castrating forces tuning in, it isn’t SCHUBERT that moderates our fantasies, but only a kiss which at the end kills all rivals.” STÉPHANE TRAPIER, Agoravox, November 9, 2009

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“Dark zones of the unconscious, images close to dream symbolism - in this kind of theater the body speaks more than words. A universe far from realism and explanation. VIGNER chooses “to give aesthetics the place it deserves in theater”. He works on the artform itself. His way to direct may well recall ALMADOVAR, FELLINI,... his set and costumes are magnificent !” LUC BOULANGER, Le Devoir, Montréal