Day 44. NBA & Une Antigone (2014)

NBA & Une Antigone (2014)

English Title

NBA

An Antigone

Director

     Arthur Nauzyciel

Year

      2014

• 1 April 2014 National Dramatic Center, Orléans (CDN); 7pm; Salle Vitez. Free entry.
• 2 April 2014 Theater Ouvert, Paris. 8pm

Form

       Play reading

Duration

       2h

NBA

Playwright

       Denis Lachaud

Synopsis: NBA

       N, B and A cross their voices. Three stories intermingle and become one between Africa, the Mediterranean Sea and Europe.

Adèle’s role: NBA

      B

Une Antigone

Playwright: Antigone

       Marie Darrieussecq

Synopsis: Antigone

       “With this Antigone I wanted restore to Sophocles a language which is neither that of Anouilh* nor that of scholars, just a simple ‘everyday’ language, to tell a universal story and that I also felt like mine: the sister who buries her brother against the law of the king. An adaptation that is very close to the text original, but a bit ‘Dehellenized’: fewer gods and more justice, perhaps.”

Marie Darrieussecq

*Explainer: Jean Anouilh was a French playwright living in German-occupied France during World War II. He wrote Antigone in 1942, though the play was originally censored due to its anti-authority message. The play was not staged in Paris until 1944, shortly before Paris' liberation.

Adèle’s role: Antigone

     Ismène, Antigone’s sister.

Production

      Actors: 
          Audrey Bonnet
          Pascal Cervo
          Xavier Gallais
          Adèle Haenel
          Hugues Quester
          Dominique Reymond

     Sound Creation:
          Xavier Jacquot

Notes

• Adèle was performing in Trois Hommes Verts (Three Green Men, 2014) at around the same time that this play reading took place—there was a two week break between when Trois Hommes Verts was staged at the Le Théâtre de Gennevilliers (March 8-21, 2014) and its season at Centre Pompidou (April 25-27, 2014). 

Adèle's previous professional connections with fellow performers

• Actor Pascal Cervo, who performed the role of the messenger Hémon in Une Antigone, was a fellow Green Man in Trois Hommes Verts (2014).
• Actor Xavier Gallais, who read the part of the guard Tirésais in Antigone in this play reading appeared as Treplev in La Mouette (2012) with Adèle.
• Actress Audrey Bonnet appeared with Adèle in Un Peuple Son Roi (2018).
• Actress Dominique Reymond played Arkadina in La Mouette (2012) and also appeared in Adèle's first film, Les Diables (2002), as La Directrice.

• Adèle was directed by Arthur Nauzyciel in her first venture onto the professional stage, in La Mouette at the Avignon Festival in 2012. This production then toured from late September 2012 until the end of April 2013.This production had its final performance (a reunion & farewell for the cast) as La Mouette: Unplugged in January 2014, not long before these play readings took place. Adèle’s work in theatre has been characterised by working with people she has worked with before, her main theatre collaborators being Theatre L’Argument (where she is a member if the troupe) and also with Arthur Nauzyciel.

Arthur Nauzyciel, who directed this play reading,  was the director of the Centre Dramatique National Orléans/Loiret/Centre (CDN of Orléans), where the play reading was staged on 1 April 2014. The two play readings that he directed, NBA and Une Antigone, were a way to present to the public a work from each of Marie Darrieussecq and Denis Lachaud, who were writers associated with the CDN, where he was the director at that time. The play reading he directed was undertaken by actors who had previous associations with the CDN, including Dominique Reymond, Marie-Sophie Ferdane, Adèle Haenel, and Xavier Gallais.

An interview with playwright Marie Darrieussecq in 2018

“In 2009, the writer created an adaptation of the tragedy of Sophocles. Here she reveals the intimate thread that connects her to the room.

In 2009 I adapted the Sophocles Antigone in my own way , a bit like I had adapted Ovid's letters of exile. It was during a seminar at the École normale supérieure, where I tried to understand this female figure, so much stronger than the one Anouilh had imagined. The text gave rise to a reading staged by Arthur Nauzyciel, with Adèle Haenel in the role of Antigone. Here is an excerpt from scene XIV.

ANTIGONE

- these funeral honors

if I had kids

if my husband was there

to rot on the ground

I wouldn't have taken it on my shoulders

against the city

Against law

why I did that

understand me

a dead husband

we remarry

we have other children

but my father and my mother

are dead

and I will never have another brother

what I had to do was there

and Creon thinks I'm guilty”

translated from https://www.nouveau-magazine-litteraire.com/le-geste-dune-s%C2%8CurFebruary 2018

[Note: According to the information about the play reading, Adèle performed the role of Ismene, Antigone’s sister, not Antigone, as the playwright recalls in this interview.]