Festival d’Avignon

After long years spent in exile in Paris, Lyubov, a strange and elusive woman, returns to her ancestral estate, about to be sold to pay off the family’s debts. As the centre around which the play revolves, forever oscillating between tragedy and comedy, this maternal figure, this mater dolorosa, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to a family unsettled by the future of the estate, and more largely, by that of this world she left behind. Modern society, with its social changes, is right around the corner, noisily announcing its arrival.

Mademoiselle Julie is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg. It is set on Midsummer's Eve on the estate of a Count. The young woman of the title is drawn to a senior servant, a valet named Jean (Nicolas Bouchaud), who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Mademoiselle Julie's father's manor, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine (Bénédicte Cerutti), cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk. On this night the relationship between Miss Julie and Jean escalates rapidly to feelings of love and is subsequently consummated. Over the course of the play Miss Julie and Jean battle until Jean convinces her that the only way to escape her predicament is to commit suicide.

Arrived in an abandoned place or emerged from a society at a standstill, men and women organize themselves in their own way, borrowing what they find on the spot and in the memory of what surrounds them, the theater and the people... In the superb mineral setting of the Boulbon quarry, Philippe Quesne, inspired by a work by the painter Jérôme Bosch, orchestrates a joyful retro-futurist epic to meet the worlds to come, between environmental science fiction and contemporary western.

Mussolini is surrounded by pictures torn from a history-generated dream which gradually merge into everyday reality. Harlequin is the servant of two masters. The permanence of the clergy in the Eternal City is placed under a great bell which swings without a clapper.