Shakespeare at the Avignon Festival: Breaking Down the Walls

International audienceThe Avignon Arts Festival was created by Jean Vilar with a production of Richard II in 1947, as a way to restore national cohesion in the aftermath of WWII. Vilar’s idea of a theatre for all people led him to develop theatrical activities outside Paris, making him a major actor of the decentralisation, and to break with Italian style theatre, particularly with the convention of the fourth wall. Vilar staged Richard II in the Honour Court of the medieval Popes’s Palace, today listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and the neuralgic centre of the festival. The choice of this venue, which was meant to revive the Greek and Elizabethan traditions of open-air theatre addressing large and diversified audiences nevertheless challenged and still challenges theatrical performances, which are either magnified or totally annihilated by the monumental upstage wall charged with history. Vilar claimed that Shakespeare’s drama, a constant in the festival since 1947, helped him to negotiate with the wall. The article purposes to question the different modes of interaction between corpus and venue: to what extent does the genius loci inform Shakespearean performances? And how does Shakespeare’s adaptogenic drama reveal itself appropriate to invent new theatrical forms, far from what Vilar denounced as “Shakespeare’s guaranteed income”