Vincent Macaigne Avant la terreur

[Theatre]

Vincent Macaigne probes deep into the most cult-like of the different Shakespearian Richards, Richard III, stripping away the central character's demonic aura in order to make him into a dangerous idiot. From out of this both terrifying and hilarious text, he brings us a joyously apocalyptic piece of total theatre, in which laughter keeps the worst of all worlds at bay.

Vincent Macaigne returns to the stage after an absence of six years in this weaving together of his readings of Hamlet (Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre) and The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. Via the character of Richard, he not only tackles a figure taken from our collective cultural heritage, but also, and more importantly, a man who is more stupid than he is evil. We are confronted with an idiot in the most negative sense of the word, a Hamlet who has gone awry, severely so, obsessed by power and hidden away in his own world, with no-one apart from his circle of scheming counterparts for company. In a free-ranging adaptation of this great text which is as chilling as it is burlesque, he provides us with a grand piece of theatre which is joyously apocalyptic, and in which laughter always comes to the rescue. On a stage overflowing with props, the actors – some of whom are children –, driven by an overflowing form of energy, perhaps that of despair, summon up a world in which buffoonery is never far from the worst, nor the utopic from the nihilistic. This is a world whose ambient brutality has left its ugly, indelible mark on innocence. Any resemblance to…