Last season, Ivo van Hove returned to the Comédie-Française for a new epic recounting an entire episode – the final one – in the story of the house of Atreus, in a production that marked the entry into the Repertoire of Euripides’ Electra and Orestes. Stating that all his projects are born from “love at first sight” for a text, he combined the two plays to tell, in its continuity, the tale of this brother and sister who unite in taking revenge against their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus who murdered their father Agamemnon. The two children were banished following the deed. Orestes was sent into exile while Electra was forced to marry a peasant living in poverty on the edge of the city. Fifteen years later, Aegisthus, who now reigns in Argos, calls for Orestes to be put to death. This is where Electra/Orestes begins, when the latter, obeying an oracle of Apollo, decides to return to his homeland to find his sister and avenge their father’s death with her.

Known for his ability to “unfold” texts on stage, the artistic director of the International Theater Amsterdam constantly renews his aesthetic and his relationship with actors. Claiming to have no designated method, here he draws on the ancient sources to celebrate theatre as a social event and takes hold of the myth with a keen sense of its modernity. Thus, in the brother and sister’s murderous destiny he reads the same mechanisms of radicalisation he already analysed in Visconti’s Les Damnés [The Damned]: “what really moves me, and what is common to the two stories, is that you see these young people – Martin and Gunther in Les Damnés, Electra, Orestes and Pylades in Electra/Orestes – plunging into the most extreme violence for reasons relating to their inner feelings, far from any ideology. This story is like an irrational inferno.”

French translation published by Éditions Gallimard, collection Folio théâtre

• Spectacle créé le 27 avril 2019 Salle Richelieu en partenariat avec le Festival d’Athènes et d’Épidaure et présenté au Théâtre antique d’Épidaure les 26 et 27 juillet 2019
• Traduction française parue aux Éditions Gallimard dans la collection « Folio théâtre »

BETWEEN THE COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE and Greek theatre, there is a long history. Perpetual renewing itself, this history alternates between borrowings and emancipation. Euripides, the most tragic of Greek poets according to Aristotle, inspired two plays performed on the stage of the Comédie-Française in 1681, that is to say one year after its foundation: Oreste (by Le Clerc and Boyer, after Iphigenia in Aulis) and Hercule (by La Tuilerie, after Herakles). Even though he remains the most performed Greek poet –far ahead of his compatriots Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Sophocles, compared to whom Latin theatre in fact has the air of a poor relation– it is primarily through adaptations that Euripides is performed, most famously in the works of Racine. In the nineteenth century, the attention paid to the original work, visible in the use of antique costumes and sets, was part of the new wave of enthusiasm for Greco-Roman antiquity, which had already been idealised during the Renaissance. As the twentieth century approached, the translations become more faithful to the originals.

Over the centuries, the heroes of Greek theatre, whose modernity is praised by Jacqueline de Romilly, have therefore provided actors with choice roles. As for Greek history and its famous episodes such as the origins and consequences of the Trojan War, it has fueled, through Racine, the imagination of playwrights up the twentieth century as well as the Repertoire of the Comédie-Française, enriched by Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War Shall not Be), (directed by Raymond Gérôme, 1988), Kleist’s Penthesilea (directed by Jean Liermier, 2008), and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (directed by Jean-Yves Ruf, 2013).

How should ancient theatre be staged today? While the mysteries of The Bacchantes (Euripides, directed by André Wilms 2005) unfold among fragments of polychrome pillars, the city of The Birds (Aristophanes, directed by Alfredo Arias, 2010) is transposed into a setting that is recognisable to the Comédie-Française audience: Place Colette. As for the new Heracles (Euripides’ Herakles, directed by Christophe Perton, 2010), he takes the form of a trader. Due to its ambivalent character, simultaneously archaic and modern, Greek theatre promises to offer directors and audiences material for reflection and innovation for a long time to come.

• Visual: Electra by Alfred Poizat, after Sophocle, 1907 – photo. Boyer, coll. CF

Translation: Marie Delcourt-Curvers
Scenic version: Bart Van den Eynde et Ivo van Hove
Directed by: Ivo van Hove
Scenography and lights: Jan Versweyveld
Costumes: An D’Huys
Original music and sound concept: Eric Sleichim
Choreographic work: Wim Vandekeybus
Dramaturgy: Bart Van den Eynde
Assistant stage manager: Laurent Delvert
Assistant scenography: Roel Van Berckelaer
Assistant costumes: Sylvie Lombart
Assistant lights: François Thouret
Assistant sound: Pierre Routin
Assistant choreographic work: Laura Aris

Pauline Chabrol: le Chœur (alternately)
Glysleïn Lefever: le Chœur (alternately)
Olivier Lugo: le Chœur (alternately)
Noémie Pasteger: le Chœur (alternately)
Sabine Petit: le Chœur ((alternately)

And
Trio Xenakis: Adélaïde Ferrière, Emmanuel Jacquet, Rodolphe Théry
Othman Louati
Romain Maisonnasse
Benoît Maurin
percussion (alternately)

Singer voice: Sylvia Bergé