Take the Australian director Simon Stone. The playbill for his new work, “The Trilogy of Revenge” (“La Trilogie de la vengeance”), running at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris through April 21, informs the reader of Stone’s long-standing “interest in the feminine condition,” demonstrated by the fact that he has directed modern versions of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Euripides’ “Medea.” We learn that “The Trilogy of Revenge,” a contemporary tale of sexual misconduct and gory retaliation inspired by Elizabethan theater, is “a meditation on violence against women.”
The implication is clear: Here is a woke production, steeped in feminist values. But the devil is in the execution, and “The Trilogy of Revenge” is too awkwardly conceived to live up to the standards it sets itself.
Stone, who is just 34, has built a career out of rewriting classic plays and lending them a contemporary twist. For “The Trilogy of Revenge,” his starting point was a trio of English Renaissance works: John Ford’s “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s “The Changeling,” and Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” All boast storylines involving rape and brutality against women, as does “Fuenteovejuna” by the Spanish Baroque playwright Lope de Vega, later added to Stone’s list of sources.
The resulting saga is divided into three plays, presented in different parts of the Ateliers Berthier, the Théâtre de l’Odéon’s second venue. The central male character, Jean-Baptiste, is seen at different stages of his life, variously engaged in incest, rape and hair-raising sexual role-play with underage girls. He gets a bloody comeuppance, when the trilogy reaches its chronological conclusion, at the hands of a group of women he wronged.
The world premiere of “The Trilogy of Revenge” at the Odéon had to be delayed by a week because the production was unfinished. It still gave that impression during a recent performance, not least because of the sheer complexity of Stone’s concept. Audience members are assigned to a group — A, B or C — as they go in. Each group then sees the three plays in a different order, with intervals in between. The eight cast members, who play multiple characters in all three plays, have to run back and forth between the stages. They repeat this marathon three times every night.
Precise timing is obviously required to synchronize the action, and by the end of the performance, some of the actors simply looked exhausted. Midway through the third story line for group B, even Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who leads a strong cast, appeared to be fully improvising a phone conversation and close to cracking up, perhaps waiting for a cue.
This needlessly complicated setup leaves little space for the kind of subtlety required to achieve Stone’s stated aim: to examine theater’s historical attitudes toward women.
Depicting gender-based violence doesn’t automatically question it. The revenge fantasy that concludes the story, in which Jean-Baptiste is tied up and tortured, is shoddily staged and devoid of tension, with actors repeatedly leaving the stage because their presence is required elsewhere. Jean-Baptiste himself gets to speak far more than any of the women, whose reasoning remains underexplored.
In this case, there is nothing inherently feminist about showing female characters suffering at length before retaliating against a caricature of a misogynist. Homicidal women have been around for a long time, as “Medea” attests, albeit in cautionary tales. Subverting that cliché requires stronger direction than “The Trilogy of Revenge” musters.
There is every reason to believe Stone genuinely wants to be an ally to women. Like a number of his peers, however, he would be a better one if he reined in the publicity to that effect and simply included multilayered, fully realized female characters in all his productions. That would be the strongest feminist statement of all.
Directorial restraint was in similarly short supply in “Who Killed My Father,” which ended a run at the Théâtre de la Colline this past week. (It will begin two weeks of performances at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg on May 2.) The writer Édouard Louis has become a prominent intellectual figure in France since his debut novel-slash-memoir about his working-class education, “The End of Eddy,” was published in 2014. “Who Killed My Father” is his third book; while it was released in print last year, it was actually conceived as a theater project.
The actor Stanislas Nordey, the artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, not only commissioned the work as a vehicle for himself but opted to direct it, too. It seems indulgent for the leader of a major publicly funded theater to invest in what is clearly a personal venture, and Nordey may not have been the right actor to bring this story to life. His grandiloquent, almost patrician diction, so unnatural that it prompted a few laughs, is at odds with the working-class milieu Louis evokes.
The young author treads familiar territory in “Who Killed My Father,” from his family’s poverty to the hatred of homosexuality he encountered growing up, but the book is politically bolder than “The End of Eddy.” It makes the argument that government policies that reduced social benefits took a toll not just on the finances of Louis’ father but also on his health. Louis, a staunch supporter of France’s left-wing opposition and the continuing yellow vest protests, points a finger at President Emmanuel Macron as well as his predecessors.
While Nordey, who is alone onstage for the better part of two hours, spares no effort, a director other than himself might have curbed his actorly mannerisms. Only in a short scene near the end, when he sits down to whisper into a microphone, does he suddenly seem vulnerable. Finally, he starts to convey the ambivalence that “Who Killed My Father” also reveals in Louis’ relationship with his parent.
The hatred the young writer publicly professed, not least in “The End of Eddy,” melts away to suggest there was love there, too, and even growing acceptance on his father’s part. That shift is what allows the audience to connect on a deeper level. Perhaps future productions will mine it further — and give his father a voice as well.
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‘The Trilogy of Revenge.’ Directed by Simon Stone. Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, through April 21.
‘Who Killed My Father.’ Directed by Stanislas Nordey. Théâtre de la Colline. Théâtre National de Strasbourg, May 2 through 15.