“Absalom, Absalom!”, a sensory dive into the segregationist history of the United States that resonates in the present

Director Séverine Chavrier adapts William Faulkner’s masterpiece of American literature at the Avignon festival.

With this adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel, director Séverine Chavrier offers an immersive dive into America during the Civil War, with very current resonances.

It is because it is considered unadaptable that Séverine Chavrier has attacked this monument. In her theatre, Absalom, Absalom ! becomes a sensory experience that requires letting go. On stage, earth, two cars, the rooms of a house and above a large screen, which projects what is playing below. Music, images, sounds, stifling atmosphere, we are at the heart of the epic drama, that of a man who came from nowhere, arrived in the segregationist South in the middle of the 19th century to make his fortune and found a family of pure lineage, obsession with the white race.

“The novel ultimately tells that the brothers kill each other and that the illegitimate son is only born illegitimate because he has a drop of black blood, explains Séverine Chavrier. So, it is a segregationist story and a madness of engendering on the question of a proper name which would be proper in both senses of the term.”

The impossible communication between men and women, between blacks and whites, that was really interesting to work on.”

Severine Chavrier

to franceinfo

A mixed, virtuoso and very current troupe carries this story, a story of American violence that does not need linearity, so strong are the emotions. Séverine Chavrier plays, as a conductor, with the codes of American cinema, notably by quoting Birth of a nation by David Griffith, a film that revolutionized Hollywood in 1915 while glorifying slavery:

The director intends to explore “how the history of the United States is linked to the history of cinema. How it was viewed. How European actors admired this game. How we are also crushed in this way of making images, up to the question of Griffith, since this film was also hailed at one time by the New Wave, without seeing its ethical dead ends”she says.