THE MORNING LIST
The team of the Scenes section has made its choices among the shows and festivals planned for the month of June: from the feminist thriller at the Odéon to the fake radio program of the “Jewish Hour” at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, ten days of circus in Le Mans to the eclectic program of the Lille Piano(s) Festival, passing by the puppets of the company Viens voir en face and Roman Frayssinet, who shares his existential questions (on tour), the choice is rich.
Here is finally the return to Paris of the brilliant Simon McBurney, with his total, multisensory and virtuoso theater. Evening all the more promising as the British director adapts On the bones of the dead, a formidable ecological and feminist thriller by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. It all starts with a dead man, a small deer bone planted across his throat. Very quickly, other disappearances follow, and each time, animal footprints are found at the crime scene. Janina Doucheyko, a woman who lives alone on the heights of this village lost in the mountains of southern Poland, investigates. Olga Tokarkzuk and Simon McBurney wonder about what it means to live in harmony with the universe, and about the links between living beings.
Play by Olga Tokarczuk. Directed by Simon McBurney. Théâtre de l’Odéon, Paris, from June 7 to 18. From 6 to 40 €.
A happily off-the-wall “Deceptive Crocodile”
Rich idea to resume this deceptive crocodile which, when it was created in 2013, was a milestone in the invention of a new form of musical theatre, much freer and more playful than traditional opera. Variation freestyle on the Dido and Aeneas by Purcell, the show mixes the energy of jazz with the baroque score, and invents a tinkered and crazy universe. Under the direction of Samuel Achache and Jeanne Candel, the story of Queen Dido, who fell madly in love with the beautiful Aeneas, who will abandon her to go and found Rome, allows itself burlesque excesses, which make the tragic and lyrical moments of all the more shocking. Judith Chemla, who embodied Dido at the creation, is here replaced by Anne-Emmanuelle Davy.
According to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. Directed by Samuel Achache and Jeanne Candel. National Popular Theater of Villeurbanne, from June 9 to 14. From 7 to 25 €.