Fanny Ardant

PRESENTATION

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

Based on the screenplay by Marguerite Duras
For Alain Resnais’ film
Adaptation and staging Bertrand Marcos

“It was a great pleasure for me to work on L’Été 80 (The Summer of 1980) by Marguerite Duras with Fanny Ardant, the actress. To conduct the merging of a text so exceptionally written with such a singular voice seemed to me blatantly obvious. The same perfect fit now had to be renewed, with another text.
I rediscovered Hiroshima mon amour, which I had browsed through quite a long time ago, and of which I did not remember very much. I was totally stunned by the power of this screenplay. I found it to be one of Marguerite Duras’ most beautiful works, among those I’ve had a chance to read. I immediately imagined Fanny Ardant embodying these striking words.
The point was to adapt the text, while preserving the essential components of Marguerite Duras’s screenplay, written for Alain Resnais’ film, in order to produce a version fit for the stage.
I’d like to make this story heard, simply, without gimmicks, and without the subjective influence of cinema. To make this text heard for what it is, for the images it gives rise to, and to give free rein to each of our imaginations.”

Bertrand Marcos

CASSANDRE

Music by Michael Jarrell
Direction by Hervé Loichemol

The voice of Fanny Ardant. Serious, momentous, yet not too much so: an alto voice. Her presence, her very way of being on stage, of being there yet not there, a scintillation. For her second collaboration with Michael Jarrell, Hervé Loichemol and Seth Tillett – the trio that shone when staging Siegfried, nocturne at the Comédie in 2013, now she is Cassandre by Michael Jarrell. This monodrama for actress and orchestra, inspired by the work of Christa Wolf, was staged during the 69th Festival d’Avignon.

Cassandre is beside herself, distraught, elsewhere. No longer fully alive, soon to die, she has chosen – perhaps – a third form of existence, neither good nor evil, neither just nor unjust, as always refusing all pretence, she who has witnessed only continual war. In a world of deception and deceit, Cassandre is a heroine beyond the world. She is that voice, fragile and stubborn, which sleeps in all of us, and which inconveniently sometimes surges forth.

Cassandre was first staged in 1994 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with Marthe Keller, and since has been translated into German, English, Italian and Finnish, playing in such prestigious venues as the Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and the Carnegie Hall in New York.

Its directing by Hervé Loichemol, marked his return to the Comédie at the Festival d’Avignon, and he has produced, among other things, Hamlet-Machine and Vie by Gündling de Heiner Müller, Lettre Au Directeur Du Théâtre by Denis Guénoun, and Lever Les Yeux Au Ciel by Michel Beretti.