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Reviewed by:
  • Avignon Theatre Festival
  • Judith G. Miller
Avignon Theatre Festival. Avignon, France. 1996. 7 July–3 August 1996.

French Caribbean productions constituted one of the most compelling theatrical categories of the fiftieth Festival of Avignon. Ironically, this inclusion paid a more appropriate homage to Jean Vilar, founder of the festival and major theoretician of “popular theatre,” than the single exposition and the one forum dedicated to his memory. The 1996 official festival, rather than featuring the contemporary inheritors of Vilar, such as Ariane Mnouchkine, who share his conception of theatre as a public service and basic human right, presented an eclectic mix of Greek and modern classics, notable, for the most part, for their dated declamatory style and grandiose castings (106 actors for an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Suppliants, for example). If not quite achieving the magical quality of Avignon’s unforgettable moments in the past—such as Vilar’s Richard II (1947), Antoine Vitez’s Molière cycle (1978), Mnouchkine’s Twelfth Night (1982), or Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1985)—the Caribbean pieces showed that the marriage of dense poetic texts with scenic inventiveness and actors clearly thrilling to the vision they are creating can still create for audiences a privileged space of empathic understanding.

Martinican writer and statesman, Aimé Césaire, the grand old man of francophone Caribbean letters, was represented by a somewhat truncated dramatic reading in the fringe festival of his epic poem Cahier du retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land) by the André Morel Company, and an elaborate postmodern staging of his 1963 play La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) in the prestigious Honor Court of the Papal Palace. For the latter production, Montpellieran director Jacques Nichet assembled a predominantly black cast, repairing by this commitment to francophone actors of African origin the damage done by the 1991 all-white Comédie Française version to the play’s powerful questioning of European political and theatrical models. Functioning on several levels, Césaire’s play should be read not only as the exploration of historical figure and Haitian revolutionary Henri Christophe (1767–1820), but also and especially as a warning to newly-formed African governments not to embrace their former colonizers’ customs and institutions.

In Nichet’s production, Cameroonian actor Emile Abossolo-M’Bo exuberantly interpreted King Christophe, the play’s eponymous hero and driven leader of independent Haiti. While the actor unfortunately chose to smooth over the tortured depths of Césaire’s complex figure, his physical vigor helped enliven the many lengthy monologues which Césaire employs to communicate Christophe’s obsession with grandeur. Taking the form of a monstrous citadel which the historical Christophe forced his people to construct and which Césaire’s stage directions would have the character Christophe build before the public’s eyes, this obsession eventually kills the king, alienating in the meantime peasants, military, and courtiers.


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Figure 1.

The peasant chorus in Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe (La Tragédie du Roi Christophe), directed by Jacques Nichet, at the Honor Court of the Papal Palace, Avignon. 1996 Avignon Festival. Photo: Laurent Pinsard.

Any production of La Tragédie du Roi Christophe must confront the challenge of staging the central image of the citadel, a metaphor for Christophe’s grand but misplaced imagination. Nichet’s solution, though technically impressive, regrettably limited his choreographic options and ultimately reduced the multiple meanings of Christophe’s fortress to the modern icon of a broken-down bus. The dilapidated bus, a faithful and far too realistic depiction of omnipresent public transportation in both Africa and the Caribbean, dominated the stage during the entirety of the production. Sheltering the chorus of peasants for the opening scene, a [End Page 63] prescient cock fight between roosters named “Christophe” and “Pétion” (Christophe’s political opponent), the bus also became a dozen other sites in the course of the production, including a battlefield for the civil war between rival Haitian factions, a foundry for the building of the citadel, and, skillfully upended at the end of Act 2, the citadel itself. By placing so much...

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