Over a hundred edited pieces, the direction of the National Theater of Strasbourg, of the Comédie française, of the Théâtre des amandiers in Nanterre, while being a professor at the Paris Conservatory, Jean-Pierre Vincent had become one of the patrons of the theater French. He died on the night of Wednesday November 4 to Thursday November 5 in Provence. He had contracted the Covid in the spring and then had several strokes.
Debut in 1958
As he said, last year, in a interview for the Avignon festival, as the son of a civil servant (father employed at the courthouse in Paris, mother seamstress at home), the high school student from Louis-le-Grand did not see himself becoming an actor.
However, in 1958, he joined the establishment’s theater group, “Because of a friend”. He was joined by other high school students, Patrice Chéreau the following year, Jérôme Deschamps a little later. ? “We were a kind of driving school. “
“We were fierce Brechtians”
A training which does not prevent these young enthusiasts, soon influenced by the spirit of 1968, from wanting to dust off the theater. They became essential and he was entrusted with the management of the National Theater of Strasbourg at 33!
“We were fierce Brechtians, he remembered. We relied on German, Russian and Italian theatrical theories. Because Parisian traditions horrified us. “
“Make sure people breathe together”
With a guideline. “I only assemble old pieces if they have something to do with today. And pieces of today if they have to do with the wind of history. So that the spectators can reflect more fully on the questions which arise for the future. “ All with an unwavering love of text … and transmission.
Did he have the feeling of making a committed theater? “I would say a theater that tries to politicize minds. To make sure that people breathe together, think at the same time. “ Sentences that sound strangely in full confinement.
Last year he had again presented L’Oreste from Eschylus to Avignon.
The year before, his George Dandin, de Molière, had marked the spirits. He had presented it in particular in Vire (Calvados).
This man with a brushed mustache and small round glasses will haunt French theaters for a long time to come.
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