Shakespeare in the spotlight of Montpellier's National Dramatic Centre

Abstract

For its 2022–23 season, the National Dramatic Centre of Montpellier put Shakespeare in the spotlight by programming no less than four productions based on his plays. This article aims to review these productions and analyse how they came together during this theatrical season to think contemporary issues through Shakespeare and to explore what it means to stage Shakespeare today.

For its 2022–2023 season, the Centre Dramatique National (CDN) Théâtre des 13 Vents [National Dramatic Centre, 13 Winds Theatre] gave pride of place to Shakespeare by programming four different productions of his plays. Located on the outskirts of Montpellier, the Théâtre des 13 Vents is one of the 38 CDNs funded by the French Ministry of Culture that were progressively instituted in France after World War II in a policy of cultural decentralisation, with the aim of providing access to quality theatre throughout the country, not only in Paris and major cities.

 The CDN's 2022–23 season opened in October with Institut Ophélie [Ophelia Institute] which could be considered as the first part of a diptych, the second being Un Hamlet de moins [One Hamlet Less]. Both adaptations were written by Olivier Saccomano and staged by Nathalie Garraud, the CDN's co-directors. They also billed another Hamlet adaptation, by Olivier Py, Hamlet à l’impératif [Hamlet in the Imperative], thus offering a third perspective on Shakespeare's masterpiece. Finally, they programmed and co-produced Marie Lamachère's diptych, La tempête et le Songe d’une nuit d’été – Such stuff as dreams… [The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream – Such stuff as dreams…], with both plays jointly exploring the world of magic. Lamachère's diptych was also co-produced by Montpellier's Printemps des Comédiens – an international theatre festival, the second largest in France, which commissions or premieres major productions. For her take on Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lamachère collaborated with La Bulle Bleue, one of the few artistic ESATs [work-based support centres] in France, and worked with La Bulle Bleue's company, made up of professional actors with various disabilities.

In 2018, when they were elected directors of the CDN, Garraud and Saccomano opened the 2018–2019 season with their production Othello, variation pour trois acteurs [Othello, a variation for three actors ], performed by the four actors of the CDN's associated company. The following season, they scheduled two Shakespearean adaptations by stage directors Dieudonné Niangouna and Julien Guill, respectively Trust/Shakespeare/alleluia and Les Pièces vénitiennes (Le Procès) [The Venetian Plays (The Trial)], which were unfortunately cancelled due to the first Covid pandemic lockdown. Niangouna's adaptation was rescheduled for the 2020–2021 season, when the CDN's directors presented their new production, Un Hamlet de moins, which was also billed during the 2021 annual Printemps des Comédiens Festival. This production has since been part of the CDN's program as a touring production.

Last year's profusion of Shakespearean productions, the vast majority of which were programmed over a span of one month, between the end of May and the end of June 2023, invites a closer exploration. All these productions seem to consider contemporary issues through Shakespeare and propose metatheatrical approaches to Hamlet, deconstructing and reconstructing the play as well as explorations of language and the significance of acting. How do these four performances resonate with one another? What did the directors wish to highlight by presenting a Shakespearean month within their season? This overview focuses on each of these performances, from the first presented at the CDN, Un Hamlet de moins, to the last that closed the 2022–2023 season, La Tempête et Le Songe d’une nuit d’été – Such stuff as dreams …, and considers their interactions as well as the questions each of them raised.

Un Hamlet de moins

Un Hamlet de moins was written by Saccomano and staged by Garraud as the first phase of their two-part work around the figure of Ophelia. The title was mainly inspired by Jules Laforgue's Hamlet ou les suites de la piété filiale [Hamlet or the Consequences of Filial Piety]: the play was first staged by Charles Grandval in 1939, with Jean-Louis Barrault playing Hamlet. The closing lines of the play include the phrase ‘un Hamlet de moins’ [one Hamlet less] – which Carmelo Bene borrowed as a title for his 1973 movie. By choosing this title, Saccomano and Garraud, who were fully aware that they were producing yet another version of one of the most staged plays in theatre history, sought to question why directors keep staging Hamlet again and again. Not only is the title derived from other Hamlet adaptations, but as the performance unravels, the actors tear apart an edition of the play translated by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. The performance becomes yet another layer of a textual palimpsest and includes itself in a broader history of Hamlet stagings.

We saw Un Hamlet de moins three times over two years: on 10 June 2021, 13 May 2022, and 23 May 2023. The first time, it took place in the CDN where the audience was asked to wait outside the gigantic backstage doors that recall the history of the Théâtre des 13 Vents, a former wine cellar and a place where people gathered merrily. The doors opened on a wooden platform erected on the usual larger stage where rows of seats on either side transformed into a thrust stage. We sat at the back, stage right. The second performance we saw was in the George Sand Cultural Activity Centre in central Montpellier, and we sat at the front, stage left. We sat stage right again for the third, open-air, performance in the courtyard of the Théâtre des 13 Vents, not far from where we first saw it. Those three very different venues highlighted the adaptive qualities of the production. Whether indoor or outdoor, the use of the wooden platform was a powerful reminder of Elizabethan stages, confirmed later by the presence of not only one but two onstage trapdoors (only one was used in the 2022 and 2023 versions). On this otherwise bare stage was a staircase that led nowhere, on which the actors sat, seemingly bored, staring at the audience entering the venue.

The first scene explored all the major themes of the play, condensing them in one powerfully aesthetic image: four teenagers wearing tracksuits sprawled on the staircase, their eyes riveted on their noisy phones. The staircase was the central piece of scenery and the starting point of Garraud's work. Saccomano explained that it was inspired by Jan Kott: ‘Feudal history is like a great staircase on which there treads a constant procession of kings. Each step upwards is marked by murder, perfidy, treachery. […] The monarchs change. But all of them […] tread on the steps that are always the same’. ¹ As the house lights remained on throughout the performance, the boundary between stage and audience was blurred. The actors who embodied the four young characters of the play, Hamlet (Florian Onnéin), Ophelia (Conchita Paz), Laertes (Charly Totterwitz), and Horatio (Cédric Michel), kept watching videos or playing games on their phones, occasionally glancing scornfully at the audience. Their attitudes, the way they slumped and seemed to resent the audience made it clear that the directors wanted to represent how today's teenagers react to adult comments with insolence and boredom. Their tracksuits ironically suggested that there would be action throughout the performance whereas the first half of the show actually took place solely on the staircase, as if the actors were trapped on that dead-end flight of stairs, mirroring the prison that Denmark is. In this sense, the directors found a visual way of representing the impossibility of action that haunts Hamlet throughout the play. Saccomano told us that he and Garraud often find inspiration in pictorial art to imbue their creations with powerful imagery. ²

There was no Mousetrap, but the metatheatrical dimension of the play was explored through a doubling process in which all the teenage characters, Hamlet excepted, also played at embodying the older characters. After the prince delivered the famous lines ‘these indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play, but I have that within which passeth show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (1.2.83–6), ³ Ophelia, pretending to be Gertrude, answered ‘Alors joue, mon petit, joue …’ [then play, my boy, play…] and Hamlet shouted back, ‘Je n’arrive pas à passer comme vous de rôle en rôle, de mains en mains, de lit en lit, de … j’ai oublié …’ [I can’t, like you, go from role to role, from hand to hand, from bed to bed, from… I’ve forgotten…] – ‘Quoi ?’ [What?] Ophelia/Gertrude asked; ‘mon texte !’ [my lines!] he answered. In addition to the numerous textual metatheatrical references, Garraud used costumes to show how the characters played other roles. Props and specific items of clothing helped the audience identify which characters the teenagers were embodying. Ophelia literally stepped into Gertrude's shoes, which were golden high-heels, and thus masterfully switched from a sniggering teenager wearing colourful sneakers to a posh British-accented queen wearing a yellow cardboard crown. The same disposable crown was used by Laertes to indicate that he was playing Claudius. Teenage Horatio doubled as Polonius but there was no particular costume or prop that made him recognisable; instead he was simply given a lisp. When Hamlet ordered Ophelia to get to a nunnery, he too started lisping, as if to remind her of her short-sighted, patronising father. This constant mockery highlighted the frequently cruel behaviour of teenagers and yet, one could wonder why a lisp was chosen to identify a grotesque Polonius. Although this choice worked well within the context of the performance, using a language disability as a means to trigger laughter remains problematic.

Eventually, Horatio/Polonius and Laertes/Claudius sit in the audience to watch the encounter between Ophelia/Gertrude and Hamlet, thereby breaking through the fourth wall and calling to mind The Mousetrap scene, which stages characters watching other characters performing in a play. The metatheatrical dimension of the performance was particularly obvious in the first scene when the most famous lines and themes of Shakespeare's text were adapted in a game of ‘would you rather’. Thus the most iconic line in theatre history became Laertes’ question to Hamlet ‘would you rather be, or not be?’ Similarly, the ghost, who does not appear and is not referred to as such, was mentioned when Hamlet asked Horatio if he would rather have all his thoughts heard by everyone or have a dead man talking to him every night. Saccomano's text thus brilliantly introduced the explicit thematic of the ghost but also cast light on the introspection implied by Hamlet's monologues.

Garraud's staging of the graveyard scene was one of baroque profusion as Hamlet lowered himself down a trapdoor to talk to Yorick's skull, but then switched to another skull and eventually threw half a dozen of them out from under the stage, turning the scene into a monstrous vanitas. The profusion of skulls also paralleled the palimpsest of adaptations and each of them could then be seen as a token of a past Hamlet production. Onnéin portrayed a sardonic, self-destructive yet vibrant Hamlet. Totterwitz was an arrogant and perverse Claudius and shifted in a flash to an absent-minded yet overprotective Laertes. Michel swept us off our feet when he turned effortlessly from a foolish Polonius to an intense Horatio reciting monologues in a low voice with tears in his eyes. Paz was astoundingly agile, moving back and forth between an exuberant Gertrude and an annoyingly scornful Ophelia.

Institut ophélie

Paz was also the main character in Institut Ophélie. We saw the performance four times, every other day during one week between 13 and 20 October 2022. The CDN's directors had wanted to work on the figure of Ophelia for a long time to address the issue of the representation of women in art history, mainly seen or painted through male gazes. As Garraud explained, she found inspiration by observing two paintings: Sofonisba Anguissola's self-portrait Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1559) which depicts the painter being painted by her mentor, thus crystallising the tensions that the male gaze has produced in the art world; and also Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Le Verrou [The Bolt] (1777–78), an ambiguous masterpiece that has given rise to divergent analysis, and that Garraud and Saccomano consider to be a representation of a rape. ⁴ In their One Hamlet Less, the directors laid the foundation for Institut Ophélie. When Polonius showed the royal couple the letter that the prince had given to Ophelia, he invited them to hide in order to observe the encounter and see if ‘the key of his desire … If this misplaced key fits the … The padlock of … of my daughter …’ As Claudius and Polonius sat in the audience, the king observed that Ophelia, who was changing and half naked, ‘has a beautiful back… she's like an image’. Those lines called to mind Fragonnard's painting and the theme that both directors wanted to address in their future play Institut Ophélie: how the male gaze objectifies women. Ironically, the main character, whom they called Jeanne to facilitate work sessions although she was never called by any name throughout the performance, kept repeating ‘I am not Ophelia’. This demonstrated their attempt to break away from Hamlet while addressing broader social issues using one of the most famous female characters of the Shakespearean canon.

Paz being the only female comedian working with the CDN's directors when the Institut Ophélie rehearsal started, Garraud and Saccommano had to change their habits and create a main character where they usually, for previous productions, systematically balanced the roles to preserve a sense of ensemble. They also hired a new actress, Lorie-Joy Ramanaïdou, one of the first actresses of African descent to be hired as a permanent artist in a CDN associated company. Garraud subtly addressed the issue of the lack of ethnic (and other forms of) diversity in the French theatre by giving Ramanaïdou the role, among others, of a cleaning-lady conspicuously ignored by all the white male characters, when she was ironically the only one to hold information on Ophelia's suicide.

Saccomano's texts, Un Hamlet de moins and Institut Ophélie, intertwined in so many ways that it was almost impossible to separate one performance from the other. When the cleaning lady in Institut Ophélie implied that Ophelia's death was due neither to suicide nor accident but murder, spectators who had seen Un Hamlet de moins were invited to remember the scene of Ophelia's suicide when Hamlet commented, ‘I read somewhere that it could have been… what again? A suicide disguised as an accident? No it was a … a crime disguised as a suicide … That's it … or something like that …’ Then the dead Ophelia entered upstage, walked along one side of the Elizabethan-like thrust stage listening to Hamlet, and turned off a switch on the side of the stage, plunging the audience into darkness. The scenography for Institut Ophélie was reminiscent of the design for Un Hamlet de moins. It was not a thrust stage but a room which could have been a movie studio setting, placed slightly askew on the larger stage and framed by two walls backstage and left, with numerous doors, leaving the wings visible stage right. While the audience entered and took their seat, Paz paced back and forth round the outside of the inner stage, and went through the lines of the monologue that Ophelia recited in Un Hamlet de moins just before her suicide, wearing exactly the same Elizabethan gown. When the audience finally sat in silence, she talked directly to one of the venue's staff members (a different one each night) to ask them to close a service door. She thus broke through the fourth wall separating her from the audience and signalled the beginning of the performance.

When she set foot on the inner stage, waltz music poured in and confirmed the metatheatrical quality of her character. From that moment on, it seemed that she was not only an actress but also the stage director. She also took up the author's voice by reciting what seemed like a prologue. The first sentence was directly addressed to the audience: ‘you see a woman’. She then described herself and what was behind her. As she went on, she not only described an imaginary landscape but also depicted a line of men, queuing outside the venue, waiting to come in and watch her. As she spoke, the spectators could visualise what she was describing, calling to mind Henry V's prologue that draws on the audience's ‘imaginary forces’ (prologue 18) to set the scene. The other characters started crossing the stage, entering and exiting through the same doors, going through the same motions as they passed on stage, as if they were ghosts from the past, summoned by Jeanne. When she lit a candle and sat, while characters paraded across the space behind her, one could not help but think of Macbeth's line ‘Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more’ (5.5.22–5). As the shadows were summoned by Jeanne, that of Un Hamlet de moins’ started looming over the performance. This setting was like the physical representation of Ophelia/Jeanne's mind, inverting the dynamic of the previous production, since these were not Hamlet's soliloquies but Ophelia's which were now heard and not Hamlet's ghosts but Jeanne's who were now being summoned. The tragedy was seen through a woman's eyes. She borrowed the famous words ‘to die, to sleep’ (3.1.66), adding: ‘but I am not dead!’ and repeatedly summoned Hamlet's imagery. As two nuns entered the stage and started talking, one of them said that if she were not a member of a convent, she would kill someone to be put in a prison cell. The other nun answered that she should not say such things because ‘walls have ears’. Again, this line reminded the audience of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia to get to a nunnery and how every word could be heard by evilly intended people hiding behind tapestries. It also recalled how women are not only trapped in physical prisons, such as the court of Denmark, but also by the role that is imposed on them by men, which makes them so scared of the outside world that they would rather kill someone than be freed from their cage. Jeanne eventually quoted the expected ‘that is the question’ (3.1.58) and summoned the ghosts of famous philosophers, both men and women, to debate ‘the question’. Even though they were not named, one could recognise Simone de Beauvoir or Gilles Deleuze who eventually told Jeanne ‘that is NOT the question’ and she answered ‘apologies, I’m drifting’. Deleuze then mentioned the fact that Jeanne could very well throw herself in a river, this act would not stop the infinite process by which bodies resonate with one another. Jeanne was leading the show, she could speak through other actresses’ mouths or pause the performance to take their place and play their part, or cut off someone's hand: she thus became director of photography and used ketchup to create a graphic image before resuming the performance.

Then she became a curator, selling to other characters all the pieces of scenery that they had progressively hung on the wall or arranged on the set, until the stage was left bare. Another meta-character, embodied by Onnéin, who was Hamlet in Un Hamlet de moins, appeared: Andy Warhol, who asked Jeanne if she had a soul. This line was an echo of Ophelia's monologue in Un Hamlet de moins, the one that Jeanne was rehearsing at the beginning of Institut Ophélie, in which she said ‘My lord Hamlet asked me if I had a soul’. Warhol embodied the commodification of art and of women depicted in the vast majority of artworks throughout history.

Jeanne exited, leaving him alone on stage, eating a vacuum-packed, ready-made sandwich. The situation was now reversed and Jeanne sat gently on a front row seat, telling the audience ‘you see a man’. Her voice came through an old radio, the only prop left on stage after the final auction. The last words she spoke were an invitation to resistance. She told women not to go home, but to fight: with the ‘wind’ of protest, change would come. Her words echoed the name of the venue, le Théâtre des 13 Vents, which also advocates change. The audience cheered and clapped, breaking the stillness and silence as Jeanne's message resonated in our minds, addressing the patriarchal structures that had conditioned our gazes for so long.

Hamlet à l’impératif !

Olivier Py's Hamlet à l’impératif ! was created for the 2021 Avignon festival, during Py's penultimate year as festival director. The Avignon version of the play was a series of ten hour-long ‘episodes’, as Py called them, performed outdoors over several days by professional actors, students of the Cannes and Marseilles regional drama schools and ‘theatre-loving citizens’. ⁵ Py also produced an eleventh episode, which was a condensed two-and-a-half-hour version, performed by professional actors only. What we saw was this condensed version.

The play was performed in the open air in the courtyard of 13 vents. The cast featured four actors, three men and a woman, and a musician, all of them Caucasian. The design featured a T-shaped stage with a bookcase looming upstage and a catwalk front stage, surrounded on all three sides by the audience, somewhat akin to the Globe's thrust stage. The wings were visible to the audience, with the actors leaving the catwalk and walking through the audience to exit and change. The only curtain on stage was a velvety piece of red fabric with a golden trim, which the actors held up to conceal Polonius when he eavesdrops on Hamlet and Gertrude in 3.4, and in which the ghost draped himself towards the end of the play. The scenography let the audience see behind the scenes and highlighted both the artifice and the history of theatre – the catwalk recalled the trestles used by travelling companies in the early modern period, and the white paint that Hamlet spread on his face at the end of the play was reminiscent of the masks used in several dramatic traditions such as commedia dell’arte, – thus echoing the production's main theme: metatheatre.

The play itself was a metacommentary on both Hamlet and the function of theatre. Theoretical discussions interrupted Shakespeare's scenes to discuss various interpretations and translations of the play by intellectuals and philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, and others. Py also included academic discussions regarding the differences between the folio and quarto versions of the play, especially concerning the circumstances surrounding Ophelia's death. Metacommentary was also entrusted to the characters themselves, as the ones who died during the play all came back to deliver a posthumous monologue discussing their lives, motivations, and death. Although intellectual discussions took up a major part of the play, the metatheatrical dimension was not limited to those scenes. The play-within-the-play was, of course, an entirely metatheatrical scene in which Py blurred the lines between audience and actors: in a move reminiscent of early iterations of the play in Avignon which featured non-professional actors, two audience members were led on stage to play Claudius and Gertrude while two of the actors performed the Mousetrap scene and a third whispered their lines to the two spectators-turned-actors, who then spoke them.

Py made a lot of cuts, excising for instance the exile to England subplot, as well as the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Instead, he focused on the most famous scenes, the ones that sparked the most critical commentaries, such as Hamlet's encounter with his father's ghost in 1.5, Polonius's eavesdropping and consequent murder in 3.4, the announcement of Ophelia's death in 4.7, the gravediggers’ scene in 5.1, and of course the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue in 3.1. Through these scenes, Py addressed what he views as the major themes of the play (theatre, death, revolution, tyranny, words, desire) and the ‘ocean of discourses’ they have inspired from the seventeenth century onwards. ⁶

Those themes also served to question the function of theatre, and more precisely of what theatre can do, especially in times of crisis. Py anchored his discussion of the power of theatre in a historical context of crisis: the characters discussed the translation in French of the line ‘The time is out of joint’ (1.5.189), insisting on Derrida's translation ‘le temps est déporté’ [‘Time is deported’], and one of the actors entered carrying a suitcase on which was pasted a Judenstern. With such explicit references to the Holocaust, Py addressed the question of what Hamlet and theatre can do socially and politically. His play regarded performance as a political imperative, ‘l’impératif de la représentation’. Theatre was presented as the art of doing, poised between ‘being and nothingness’ as the play says, quoting one of Sartre's most famous books. At some points, the play sounded like a manifesto for theatre and its power of action. Unmitigated sentences such as ‘Theatre is the assassination of the audience’ or ‘There is no legitimate power, only theatre has any legitimacy’ were shouted by the actors, seemingly giving an absolute answer to the questions raised by the play.

All this made for a very intellectual play, which aimed to make the audience think about Hamlet rather than emotionally involve themselves in the experience. Everything, from the design to Py's text, concurred to remind the audience that this was a theatrical performance – the intellectual discussions on Hamlet and theatre obviously served that purpose, but even Shakespeare's text was adapted to include more metatheatrical comments. For example, during the gravediggers’ scene, one of them pointed out that ‘this cemetery [was] also a theatre’. Jokes peppered the play, giving the audience a welcome respite from the theoretical developments that constituted most of the text, which we found to be extremely well-written overall – it was published in its entirety by the editor Actes Sud in 2021. The play also used intertextual references to broaden the scope of the play – for example, one of the actors stood at the top of the bookshelf to talk about love and language, recalling the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

The main feeling that emerged from seeing the play was that of a perpetual tension between thinking and acting, questioning and asserting. The categorical statements mentioned above were mitigated by a constant questioning which resulted from the confrontation of various theories surrounding Hamlet and, more widely, theatre. Moreover, by constantly interrupting scenes from Hamlet to discuss them, Py gave the feeling that the play was staggering under the weight of four hundred years of reinterpretations – which was never more palpable as when one of the actors brought John Everett Millais's 1851–52 Ophelia painting on stage and declared that ‘centuries accumulate on her image’ – as if it had become impossible simply to perform Hamlet. There was a certain paradox in talking about theatre as a call to action while at the same time constantly interrupting the action to comment on the play – yet, considering the importance of inaction in Hamlet, this concept resonated strongly with the play and enabled the audience to see it through another lens. Despite constant metacommentary and questioning of the text, the closing words were Shakespeare's: Sonnet 18.

La Tempête et le Songe d’une nuit d’été – Such stuff as dreams …

La Tempête et le Songe – Such stuff as dreams… [The Tempest and A Dream – Such stuff as dreams …] was directed by Lamachère for her own company, Interstice, and La Bulle Bleue company of professional actors with disabilities: it was the first time Lamachère and her cast were working on Shakespeare or any other early modern dramatist. Work began in 2021 and Lamachère and her company benefited from a residency ⁷ at the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL), at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Lamachère and members of La Bulle Bleue met with IRCL scholars and in return invited them to La Bulle Bleue where they attended rehearsals and had further conversations with the company. This relationship was enriching and fulfilling for both IRCL, since it offered the academics different perspectives on the plays, and the Bulle Bleue, since – as Lamachère explained ⁸ – it helped the actors tackle a challenging, iconic author for the first time through a better understanding of the context in which the plays were written and performed, their language, and Elizabethan theatre.

Performed in the main venue of the 13 Vents as part of the 37^th annual Printemps des Comédiens Festival, La Tempête et le Songe d’une nuit d’été – Such stuff as dreams… brought together the actors of La Bulle Bleue and members of Interstices, mostly young actors just out of drama school ⁹ . Lamachère staged The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream as a diptych, drawing on the magical texture and language of the two plays. Some actors only appeared in one part of the diptych.

The design for The Tempest was an almost bare stage, with a black scrim stage left, on which text was occasionally projected. A metallic structure resembling a cage was erected stage right, with a table inside it, upon which stood a model boat and a chess set. Prospero's fur coat hanging on one of the cage's poles completed the decor. The entire back wall of the stage was a screen. For A Midsummer Night's Dream the words ‘Les choses semblent si ténues’[Things seem so tenuous] ¹⁰ were spelt out on art nouveau metal arches with light bulbs which occasionally lit up, revealing either the whole sentence or parts of it.

As the subtitle ‘such stuff as dreams’, ¹¹ borrowed from Prospero's words to Ferdinand, suggests, Lamachère invited us to use our imagination and join the collective awakening dream played out by the actors on stage in a Shakespearean process reminiscent, for instance, of the words Shakespeare lends Gower in Pericles ¹² to set the scene. This focus on inclusiveness took on a double meaning given the diversity of the actors. Lamachère chose to address disability simply by neutralising it at the very beginning of the play. Indeed, one of Prospero's first sentences, ‘Ne soyez pas déconcertés par mon infirmité’ [Do not be unsettled by my infirmity], ¹³ served as a powerful and reflective statement on diversity, allowing the actors and the audience to set aside any expectations, questions or preconceived ideas they might have, and simply get on with the play.

The production laid special emphasis on the language, variously to highlight its beauty, magic and complexity. Lamachère commissioned new translations from Julie Étienne and Joris Lacoste, ¹⁴ since she wanted to counterweight the potentially insurmountable Shakespearean text and iconic translations into French such as those by François-Victor Hugo, Yves Bonnefoy, or Jean-Michel Déprats, and offer the cast a fresh approach to the play, enable them to make the words their own from the outset, as well as infuse the plays with a re-actualised playfulness. ¹⁵ The audience, which was captivated and reacted with loud cheers, could easily feel the cast's joy when performing on stage. Some parts of the diptych were in English, mostly for the lyrics of the numerous songs in the play, as a lively tribute to Shakespeare's text.

Language was also a visual element in this production, since parts of Prospero's cues were projected on the scrim. The actor playing Prospero, Philippe Poli, has memory issues, as we had observed during the rehearsals, and part of his learning process is to identify his fellow actors’ cues or those in the script which then trigger his own. Having words projected on a screen, in addition to being an aesthetic choice highlighting the importance of the text, cleverly enabled Poli to access his visual cues through an artistic proposition. Rather than risking to place the actor in an uncomfortable position were he to forget his cues, Lamachère transformed them into an aesthetic feature and even made fun of the device in a metatheatrical manner when the projected text faded too quickly for Poli to read or when a word was projected alongside others resembling it, so that he could pretend to have forgotten his cue while proving, in fact, quite the opposite.

At times, Poli would say his cues differently from what was projected on the screen, exposing the very craft of theatre: performances vary from one evening to another. This also highlighted the trust Lamachère placed in the actors to do their ‘job o’ work’. She chose further to expose the making of theatre through the costumes designed and created by Cathi Sardi: the mechanicals were dressed in punk-rock coveralls, reminding us of the shadow workers or the technicians working backstage to make the show happen.

In addition to being presented with a masterful way of seeing the play's text, we were also offered various ways of hearing it. When Prospero cast spells or was angry, the actors playing Caliban and Ariel would speak at the same time, creating disturbing and ominous echoes, as if drawing attention to the sheer magnitude of Shakespeare's legacy: does it take more than one voice to convey his words and one actor to portray Prospero? By having the three actors speak at the same time, Lamachère suggested that Shakespeare's words belong to many voices and that there are an infinity of Prosperos; at the same time, such choices underscored the intense camaraderie among the actors of the company.

Some of the text was delivered through songs composed by Sarah Métais-Chastanier. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, some of the fairies and Puck, with the backup of pre-recorded voices and a musician on stage, sang several songs, either as a sort of concert or to accompany a scene performed by other actors. The songs illustrated once again the playful potential of the text, and the actors demonstrated their ability not only to speak but also to sing Shakespeare's words in English. At times, the songs also illustrated Lamachère's focus on magic as they resembled incantations or entrancing magic spells.

A Midsummer Night's Dream provided yet another way to deliver the text, as a commentary, spoken by Puck to a shadow-like character whom Lamachère added to the play. They sat just off the edge of the stage, between the audience and the actors and commented on the action, mostly the scenes of the lovers in the forest, as if watching a film with friends. All these variations on the text created the effect of a palimpsest and demonstrated Lamachère and her actors’ active involvement in the creative process.

Lamachère's directing invited the audience to discover what actors with disabilities can bring to our understanding and experience of Shakespeare – as mentioned before, in some instances her artistic choices relied on the actors’ disabilities to challenge the text and add another level of meaning. Yet, at times, she seemed mainly to rely on the able-bodied actors to drive the play forward, whom she cast as the besotted and excessive teenager lovers (Guillaume Morel, Agathe Mazouin, Zoé Van Herck, and Martin Mesnier), while the troupe of La Bulle Bleue played the craftsmen as a blissfully oblivious group, not interacting with the lovers until the very end of the diptych.

Because the design for A Midsummer Night's Dream consisted mainly in the illuminated metal arches, and the play was experienced mostly like a collective surreal dream, the production lived up to the welcoming and inclusive subtitle ‘Such stuff as dreams…’. The task of filling in the blanks between the characters entering and exiting as well as visualising the forest and the actions of the characters offstage was left to the audience, guided only by the words on the arches, ‘Les choses semblent si ténues’, which conveyed the vulnerable evanescence dreams – and performance.

The infectious camaraderie of the actors and the overall playfulness which ran through the diptych, combined with the sharp-tongued Puck, culminated with the rendering of Pyramus and Thisbe by the craftsmen: a voluntarily grotesque play-within-the-play intended to celebrate the involuntary ludicrousness of the young couples’ loves. The most grotesque part was the actor playing Wall (Théophile Chevaux), wearing only his underwear, covered with a liquid resembling plaster, and holding up two fingers to figure the crack, just as in Shakespeare's text, all the while standing and slipping on a plastic sheet, and being roughly pushed around by Pyramus and Thisbe as they communicated through the crack. This über-comical rendering of Pyramus and Thisbe really captured the audience's attention, the spectators were laughing loudly and clapping before the end.

The proxemics and the movements in space of A Midsummer Night's Dream utilised the entire space of the venue: actors hugged, kissed, shouted at each other from afar, fought, ran across the whole stage into the rows where the audience sat, exited and entered from the side and rear doors of the auditorium, as if trying to push beyond the enclosed space of the venue and break through the walls of the theatre, as if Shakespeare could not be contained, recalling a sentence from Institut Ophélie, ‘Il y a quelque chose au-delà des murs du théâtre’ [There is something outside the walls of the theatre] – to be let in or reach out to? Could it be Shakespeare's presence, watching over all these enthralling adaptations of his plays?

Conclusion

Despite having been created at different moments by different people, these four productions seemed to resonate with one another – a feeling which was enhanced by the fact that we saw most of them in the span of one month. Echoes of Un Hamlet de moins were heard in Institut Ophélie, and vice versa. The thrust stage used in Hamlet à l’impératif ! and its four-actor system mirrored those of Un Hamlet de moins. And Lamachère's production was conceived as a diptych.

All four productions featured two closely related elements: a metatheatrical dimension, and intertextual references. This highlighted the historical layers that make up the palimpsest of Shakespeare's text, Shakespearean productions and the critical comment the plays have generated, as well as the sheer scope of this legacy: Shakespearean images and references seemed to permeate the productions, uncontainable, resurfacing from the depths of our memories to form a rich network of meaning.

All four plays also addressed social issues and the place of minorities both on stage and beyond the walls of theatre - aptly reminding the audience how much the French theatrical community needs yet to progress in terms of diversity. By putting Shakespeare in the spotlight, the 2022–2023 season at Montpellier's Théâtre des 13 Vents participated in the social debate regarding feminism, disability, and social and political change - foregrounding the question of what, as Py phrases it, theatre can do, for its audiences and, more widely, French society.