“There, it’s very simple. Once upon a time, there was a man and a city who met, loved, married and had a child named Festival. “ It was Jean Vilar himself who wrote it in 1963. Sixteen years after having laid the cornerstone of the Festival d’Avignon, with the Art Week held from September 4 to 10, 1947, the tone is already legendary. The founding myth, already built.
As always, the story is a little more complicated than the legend, even if it largely follows its contours. The love at first sight between the city of the Popes and the founder of the Festival was not at first obvious. Jean Vilar may be from Sète, but in 1947 he was far from this dry, stony and austere Provence. At 35, he made himself known in Paris for his productions of Nordic or Elizabethan authors. He just signed a noticed version of Murder in the cathedral, by TS Eliot, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.
The court, “a shapeless place”
“Good luck wanted everything to arise from an encounter with the poet”, he wrote a few years later. The poet: René Char (1907-1988), native of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (Vaucluse), resistance fighter – head of the Durance Sud sector under the name of Captain Alexandre -, friend of painters and art critic and editor Christian Zervos (1889-1970). However, in this spring of 1947, Zervos is preparing an ambitious exhibition of modern painting for the grand chapel of the Palace of the Popes. He is thinking of accompanying the exhibition with a theatrical manifestation. René Char gives him the name of Jean Vilar. “One day in April 1947, rue du Bac, beneath a Calder mobile, Christian Zervos, in a low voice, offered to give a – yes, only one – representation of Murder in the cathedral in the Palace “, said the director.
Jean Vilar goes to see the Palace, which he had visited as a child. When he enters the courtyard, a spring sun gilds the walls. And Vilar begins to draw a plan of the stage and the room
Vilar refuses. “I’m too young to do covers”, he argues. And then the court seems to him an impossible place: “It’s a shapeless place, I’m not talking about the walls, but the floor; technically it is an impossible theatrical place, and it is also a bad theatrical place because history is too present there. “ And yet he is tempted. Fifteen days later, he proposed to Zervos to come to Avignon with three creations: Richard II, by Shakespeare, then never performed in France, and two French works by living authors, Story of Tobias and Sara, by Paul Claudel, and The midday terrace, of the very young Maurice Clavel. “To play the adventure, you had to play it completely”, he will explain later.
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