Jonathan Capdevielle Caligula

[Theatre]

Jonathan Capdevielle stages the fall of Caligula in a production that alternates between proximity with the Albert Camus’s text, its fragmentary reworking via an audacious visual and sound-based staging, and acting which is pushed to the limits. The result is chaos and art at the heart of power.

If Caligula’s short reign left the image of a cruel tyrant, taken up with his hatred of the Senate and with erasing the limits between liberty and the arbitrary, Albert Camus’s piece, published in 1944, endows him with a more romantic, absurd dimension. An artist in the seat of power. This is the complex idea that the director filters into his Caligula, by choosing to mix together two versions of the work, in the course of a re-working carried along by the impressive, tectonic shifts in its construction. That of the performers and moving bodies, innervated by a process of observation of today’s world and traversed by the tensions present in the text, but also their diffracted voices, scattered into chants and murmurs. That of the onstage sound and original music performed live, to meandering, unstable effect. And that of the scenography: the intrusion into the theatre of an imposing, energizing rocky outcrop, upon which Jonathan Capdevielle organizes the chaos and observes a man’s prolonged suicide, totally absorbed by the quest for an untainted truth, which erodes the different structures, unmasks and shakes up society. We are witness to an earthquake which is both intimate and political, the spoken lines of which makes us tremble to this day.