ARCHIVES 2017 / The Daughter of Mars

“So many things stir in the hearts of women that are never meant to see the light of day!”

On the stage, the Amazon Penthesilea appears. She tells a story that took place long ago, the story of the siege of Troy. There she fought Achilles, who died out of love for her, when the goal of the war was only to take prisoners so that children could be born. Penthesilea and Achilles are dead now. It is there, near the bodies of the two lovers, that she comes back from after the disaster to tell its story. She tells of the history of her people from their origins, of the law of the Amazons, of the last words of her mother Otrera, of her meeting Achilles, a blinding encounter on the battlefield, and of the upheaval it caused and how it led her to neglect her duty. Penthesilea remembers the “shockwave,” the bodies struggling in lust, the scorched earth, a vibrant zone of stridency and screeches. Till the end, thanks to the power of words, she will replay this deadly love, under the watchful eye of her confidante and lifelong friend Prothoe. The words of Heinrich von Kleist, translated into French by Julien Gracq, give us to hear the desperate song of a woman torn between the culture that made her who she is and the white hot burn of the first man she ever met.

Jean-François Matignon
Jean-François Matignon was in college when he fell in love with the theatre, and shortly thereafter with cinema. His first direction came in 1987 with an adaptation of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher, followed in 1988 by Raymond Guérin's La peau dure (Thick Skin). In 1990, he founded Compagnie Fraction, with which he created over twenty shows based on works by contemporary authors such as Modiano, Genet, Williams, Müller, Peace, and Brecht, and on classics by Shakespeare, James, or Büchner. Directing plays could have simply been a way to report on his own life, but soon Jean-François Matignon started working on a project of total theatre, bringing together a novelistic approach and stage writing. Theatre became a place where the infinitesimally big and the infinitesimally small are constantly talking to each other. At the heart of this approach, this quote by Büchner: “Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.” Jean-François Matignon previously directed three plays at the Festival d'Avignon: Gabily's Lalla (or the Terror), Stefanovski's Hotel Europa, and Büchner and Peace's W/GB84. During the 70^th edition of the Festival, he also oversaw a tribute to Gabily, a reading of excerpts entitled Marguerite L.

Heinrich von Kleist
Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a German writer, poet, dramatist, and essayist. Like Goethe or Hölderlin, he was part of the early Romantic period in Germany, the most absolute one, which intended to redeem humanity through poetry. His work, panned by Goethe, was only recognised more than a century after his death. Like the great Romantic heroes, he committed suicide after killing Henriette Vogel on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee in Berlin. On his grave is written this line from The Prince of Homburg: “Now, Immortality, you belong to me.”