Richard Martin, the founder and director of the Toursky theater, is dead – Libération

2023-10-17 14:46:07

A key figure in the Marseille artistic scene, Richard Martin described his theater as a “place of poetic resistance”. He died at the age of 80.

Actor, director, theater director, poet. He preferred the word “saltimbanque”, which he disseminated everywhere in his lyrical and passionate flights, which became his signature over the decades. Richard Martin, the founder and tireless director of the Toursky theater in Marseille, died Monday October 16 at the age of 80. It was at the beginning of the 70s, after a career started in the boulevard in Paris, that he decided to settle down in Marseille. “I felt that it was a city-universe, the opposite of Nice where I was born,” he rewinded for Libé in February. If I had to marry a city, it would be this one.” The mayor at the time, Gaston Defferre, gave him an abandoned hangar in the Saint-Maura district, “one of the poorest in Europe”. He will build a “place of poetic resistance”, his own left bank in the middle of the working-class district, where for five decades, in the wake of Léo Ferré who was his traveling companion, the big names invite themselves on stage: Lavilliers, Caubère, Biolay and even Barbara Hendricks, invited for the thirtieth anniversary of Toursky. Committed as we breathe, he also exports his vision of a people’s theater outside its walls, traveling through cities to present his plays, or recently even hosting a group of yellow vests in residence.

But it was to defend his theater that the director showed himself most passionate. His first hunger strike dates back to 1981, already to denounce cuts in public funds. He then hung from a basket several meters high, in front of the facade of his theater. For his fourth and final protest, in February, he installed his red bed in the lobby of his theater. This time, it was to denounce a reduction in subsidies by the town hall, which also pointed to a necessary compliance with the occupancy agreement for the theater, housed in a municipal building. Richard Martin above all saw it as a way of pushing him towards the exit. “They think I have nothing more to say? I may be a has-been, but not in poetry!” then sent them back the actor who, in his fight, had received the support of numerous artists, signatories of a petition which brought together more than 20,000 people. “Le Toursky en resistance”, still displays the theater’s website, even if relations between the theater and the municipality had calmed down in recent months. “Despite our differences, we had always maintained the bonds of friendship, and had been able to find the path to dialogue for the future of the Toursky theater,” wrote Monday evening the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, paying tribute to “the tireless commitment of an artist, activist for culture and working-class neighborhoods for more than fifty years”.