ARCHIVES 2018 / PURE PRESENT

Made up of three plays, Pure present is based on Aeschylus's tragedies, which Olivier Py has been translating and directing for ten years. This intimate relationship with the ancient poet has opened a breach in his aesthetics similar to that created by his work with prisoners. For the playwright and director of the Festival d'Avignon, the plays born of this experience, here The Inaccessible, The Unaccomplished, and The Irrevocable, are an opportunity to pare down his theatre and sharpen his writing. For “this tragedy of our pure present” in which “the smallest gesture betrays our guilt,” Olivier Py chose swiftness and concision by focusing on a small number of striking characters and extreme situations: a prisoner and a chaplain, a banker and his son, a masked man and the crowd, a burning prison, a gunshot, a masked revolution. All take part in verbal jousts which echo and answer each other. All make theirs a question that cannot be answered either by morality or by the law: “How to live with dignity?”

Olivier Py
In 2013, Olivier Py became the first artist to be appointed director of the Festival d'Avignon since Jean Vilar. A director for the theatre, the opera, and cinema, but also an actor and poet, Olivier Py anchors his work in his contemporaries' preoccupations, in order to open up a poetic and political dialogue about the life of the individual as part of a community. Theatre is his culture and his instrument: with him, words become actions, without losing sight of the fact that this gesture—a poem—could one day be the basis of new democratic forms.