The Avignon Theatre Festival: A celebration of combative love

The Pope, of course, cannot be missed. The old man walks with dignity across the huge red stage floor of the Cour d’Honneur of the Pope’s Palace in Avignon, where the Catholic Church leaders resided in the 14th century. He counts the wheelchairs at the side, otherwise all you see is the urinal, bidet and toilet, and leaves satisfied. The theater festival in Avignon is world famous; the opening featured six plays by renowned theater makers, the best of which were performed in the festival’s legendary open-air venues. In the Pope’s Palace, the radical performer Angélica Liddell recreated the funeral of the filmmaker she admired, Ingmar Bergman, in the abandoned quarry of Boulbon with her show “Demon,” which brilliantly called for artistic freedom. The journey there by bus is an adventure. In a similarly furious spectacle, festival director Tiago Rodrigues takes Euripides’ “Hecuba” and continues it into the present day, dealing with everything from child abuse to murder by the state.