Curators’ Statement
Hecuba, Not Hecuba is a renowned production of the famous French Theatre Comédie-Française from Paris, which will be presented to the Bitef audience for the first time. It is directed by prominent Portuguese artist Tiago Rodrigues, recently appointed as artistic director of the prestigious theatre Festival D'Avignon. Rodrigues’ artistic work is characterised by frequent reinterpretations of classics and blending of fiction with true stories. His approach is deeply rooted in writing for and with actors and/or the audience, by means of which he seeks poetic transformation of reality through theatre. Rodrigues also employs these strategies in his latest piece Hecuba, Not Hecuba, which recently premiered at the D'Avignon Festival, using the myth of Hecuba and her children that she lost in the Trojan War as a starting point, and also drawing from Euripides' tragedies The Trojan Women and Hecuba. However, Rodrigues expands this context by integrating a contemporary true story of a specialised institution for autistic children in Geneva and a mother who, looking to protect her child, sues the institution following leaked reports of abuse of its residents. Exploring universal themes of suffering, justice, and motherly love, the performance raises the question of whether a world where children endure such suffering at all deserves to be saved.
About the Performance
For his first collaboration with Comédie-Française troupe, Tiago Rodrigues takes on the story of Hecuba. As is customary in his theatre, with a direct address to the audience, he intertwines the timeless issues of the ancient Trojan woman with those of a modern woman, an actress and mother, caught in similar torments. Tiago Rodrigues often says he doesn’t write plays for the theatre, but for the actors who bring them to life. Here, an actress rehearses Euripides’ “Hecuba”. She plays the role of Priam’s widow. She who, in the defeat of Troy, lost everything: her husband, her throne, her freedom, and, to her greatest sorrow, almost all of her children. She is a woman who demands justice.
Yet the fictional tragedy painfully intertwines with the intimate reality of the actress, whose autistic son has been a victim of abuse, a situation she condemns and protests against. The rehearsal period of the play overlaps ambiguously with that of a judicial investigation. In a unique and twilight-like setting, two worlds come into contact with each other, in a troubled and troubling intertwining, between the tragedy of myth and that of reality, between the play of theatre and that of justice.
The Author
Tiago Rodrigues, playwright and director, encountered the Belgian company tgSTAN in 1997, while he was still a student, an encounter that definitively confirmed his commitment to the collective spirit within theatrical creation. Co-founder, with Magda Bizarro, of the company Mundo Perfeito in 2003 in Lisbon, he has since created nearly thirty productions in over twenty countries. These include António e Cleópatra based on Shakespeare in 2015, Bovary based on Gustave Flaubert’s novel, The Way She Dies based on Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” with tgSTAN, and Dans la mesure de l’impossible, a play he wrote based on interviews with thirty members of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. After leading the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon from 2015 to 2021, he took over as director of the Avignon Festival in 2023. There, he notably created Chekhov’s La Cerisaie in the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des papes in 2022.
His theatrical work, written in Portuguese and published in French by Les Solitaires Intempestifs, has been translated into 9 languages (French, Spanish, Dutch, Estonian, Italian, Romanian, German, Arabic, and Korean).
From the Reviews
The intertwining of life, theatre, and theatre within theatre unfolds here with an elusive subtlety, mirroring the long, black, and sober costumes worn by the actors. Nadia’s story is steeped in life itself, as Tiago Rodrigues draws inspiration from real events that caused a scandal in Switzerland a few years ago. How does Nadia, living her own tragedy, inhabit the role of Hecuba so deeply? And how does Hecuba, who refuses to yield to the murderers of her children, give Nadia the strength to fight her own battles? Tiago Rodrigues’ performance is a magnificent homage to theatre, to its long history, and its founding myths, which continue to be both formative and liberating for those who choose to engage with them.
Fabienne Darge, Le Monde
