Spectators spend more than half their day in front of this epic, interspersed with several breaks.
“What selflessness!” launches the actress to the public. “Either they are masochists”, jokes another comedian. At the Festival d’Avignon, a theatrical epic entitled The Nest of Ashes takes up the challenge of keeping spectators seated for 13 hours… with a few intermissions all the same.
This is not a first. In 2018, Julien Gosselin made a ten-hour adaptation of three novels by the American Don DeLillo, and this very year, the outgoing director of the festival, Olivier Py, is mounting his monumental work My Exalted Youth (10 hours also).
At La Fabrica, one of the festival stages just outside the “City of the Popes”, the public, who generally remained until the end, got up around midnight to loudly applaud the 17 actors and actresses of the nest of ashes, by thirty-year-old playwright Simon Falguières.
“They didn’t leave!”
After each of four intermissions and two breaks, two comedians rave- “They’re not gone!” – and have fun encouraging or teasing the audience. In this epic divided into seven parts and which opposes a real world to that of fairy tales, we find a couple who abandon their baby near the trailer of a traveling theater troupe, then on the other hand, a sick queen – a sort of allegory, a king and a princess who want to cure her.
The two worlds, separated by a different and effective scenography, come together at the end of 13 hours, after a series of adventures where the fable mixes with winks at the news.
The general public conquered
Despite scenes that might seem disjointed, some spectators interviewed by AFP at the end of this marathon seemed transported by the experience.
“This format deserves to exist; it’s a good quirk; I looked at my phone very little, the news, the messages, we’re a little out of time,” says Jude Butel-Gans, 23, a student in social sciences from Lyon.
“We are happy to have held on, we let ourselves be carried away,” laughs Marie Roux, 45, trained in this experience by her daughter Manon, 17, a student at the Paris Conservatory. “But I think it’s complicated for it to be done elsewhere than in Avignon”.
“I think there are times when it could have been more in depth but it’s easy to follow,” comments her daughter. Julie, a director from Strasbourg, did not like the words at all, but nuance: “take this time, to stop our watches, it’s a nice gesture”.