The 2025 Grec festival, the first under the new directorship of Leticia Martín Ruiz, opened on 26 June and ran through to 4 August. 97 productions attracted 127,724 spectators for the 2025 festival – almost 9,000 less than in 2024. This was attributed by the festival team to the fact that there were six less productions this year in the 1900-seat Greek amphitheatre, Teatre Grec, the festival’s flagship venue. Co-productions included Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Ihsane and Handspring Puppet Company/William Kentridge’s Faustus in Africa!. Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo’s The Brotherhood and KVS & Tonnelhuis’s Mother Courage (directed by Lisaboa Houbrechts) were among the visiting international productions with Catalan writers and companies (Josep Maria Miró, Helena Tornero, Agrupación Señor Serrano, La Caldera, La Perla 29) boasting new productions part of the commitment to new dramaturgy and the support of local talent that has always been a key part of the Grec.
After five days in Avignon where highlights included Israel Galván and Mohamed El Khatib’s Israel & Mohamed, Milo Rau’s La lettre, Tiago Rodrigues’ La distance, and Dida Nibagwire and Frédéric Fisbach’s Gahugu Gato, I spent few days at the Grec taking the opportunity to see three productions. Josep Maria Mestres production of Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant with iconic actor Josep Maria Pou in the role of Roald Dahl proved a sell-out success at the Romea theatre. Montreal-based collective People Watching, founded in 2020, brought their innovate tanztheater piece Play Dead to the Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona’s premier dance venue. Performed and directed by Ruben Ingwersen, Jérémi Levesque, Natasha Patterson, Brin Schoellkopf, Jarrod Takle, and Sabine Van Rensburg, the piece melds circus, acrobatics, contemporary dance, physical theatre and performance in an inventive tale of characters trapped in what appears to be a Buñuelian scenario – a room where they wait, smoke, trip over, try to connect, fail to connect and fall flat on their faces. There are duos and trios and sole performances. The performers eat, they spin each other around, they dance, they climb in and out of a wardrobe – as if trying to find a space to hide or cling on to. They swing from a light as if it is a pendulum. One performer walks on a row of bottles as if it is a tightrope– sometimes he knocks the bottles down and when he manages to walk across the row, the audience applaud in delight. Duos of performers fight, they scuttle like crabs across the stage. Performers press together and pull apart. They fall to the floor, like corpses.
Contortions and caresses in Play Dead:
Photo © People Watching
There is a wonderfully inventive energy to the production. Short snappy scenarios blend together in a dreamlike manner; some are fast and frenetic, others are tender and leisurely. The music and sound design by Colin Gagne, Francisco Cruz, Olivier Landry-Gagnon, and Stefan Boucher blends plucked violin strings with the sound of scratched records. Emily Tucker’s set design offers boxes and a wardrobe into which the characters slip and slide. Emile Lafortune’s lighting design proffers pockets of action. It’s an hour and ten minutes of bodies trying and failing to find connection – with vertical and horizontal spheres of action. A virtuosic piece that played to a packed out and appreciative audience.
Dance meets acrobatics as the wardrobe becomes the space for revelation and concealment in Play Dead: Photo © People Watching
Tiago Rodrigues’ Hécube, pas Hécube (Hecuba, not Hecuba) seen at this year’s Grec a full year after its premiere at Avignon in 2024, offers a metatheatrical refashioning of Euripides play by a writer-director unafraid of exploring the dynamics, efficacy and boundaries of what theatre can be. Here the past and present come together as a theatre company (the Comédie-Française, co-producers of Rodrigues’ production) rehearses Hecuba in the present with actress Nadia Roger (an incredible performance by Elsa Lepoivre) in the title role. Rehearsals of the play are juxtaposed with Nadia’s attempts to secure justice for her autistic pre-adolescent son, Otis, mistreated in the specialist care home where he now lives. Nadia is taking the French state to court; she wants responsibility taken for what happened to Otis and the piece juxtaposes the court case – care assistants, the manager of the care home and the Minister of Heath, who is there to defend the children’s home, give testimony – as simultaneously, Nadia rehearses the play with her fellow actors from the Comédie-Française. The company’s actors take on the roles of the prosecutor and witnesses as the piece gives form to Nadia’s emotions and plight – it is as if Hécuba, pas Hécuba exists in a space between the two worlds.
Hecuba has lost almost everything – her husband, her status, her son; Nadia is determined to ensure no other mother has to lose their son in the way that she feels she has. She notes her son has lost weight, she knows from his deployment of a 50-word vocabulary that something is wrong. Her pursuit of justice has a parallel in that same pursuit by Hecuba who demands justice from Agamemnon after she has blinded Polymestor and killed his sons in revenge for murdering her own son. In this way, Hecuba effectively takes control of Nadia.
Rehearsals are not smooth or easy; the actors struggle to speak as one – something reflected in the chorus’s attempts to find a consistent voice. Perhaps Rodrigues’ is suggesting that we can never have a consistent voice and that choruses are always sites of polyphony? Nadia has to leave rehearsals early to reach the court – not always understood by her fellow cast members who are focused on the opening night: the show must go on. She is at once an observer in the court and a participant – where her fellow actors (who also double as the chorus) take on key roles: Denis Podalydés impresses as a lucid prosecutor and a resolute Agamemnon: Loïc Corbery plays both the smooth-talking Minister of Health and Polymestor, the confidante to Queen Hecuba who then betrays her and kills her son Polydorus; Séphora Pondi excels as Nadia’s lawyer and one of the care assistants on trial. Art is shown to have parallels in life as theatre is here presented as a court of justice.
Hécube, pas Hécube gives form to the inner life of the characters. The audience watches both narratives unfold. Nadia uses Hecuba’s language to expose the abuse of those who are most vulnerable in society. At one point the entire cast put on a replica of Otis’ helmet and begin a dance in unison to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” – the same song that brought traumatised characters together in Jim Cartwright’s 1986 play Road. It is as if the action is stopped temporarily, a moment where music captures mood and provides a space for audience reflection; it reminded me of the use of Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma” in Patrice Chéreau’s 1995 staging of Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of Cottonfields).
The shroud removed from the statue of a dog by Elsa Lepoivre’s Hecuba in Tiago Rodrigues’ Hécube, pas Hécube. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage
The statue of a dog, at first covered by a shroud, dominates Fernando Ribeiro’s expansive set. When the shroud is removed by Nadia, at one point enveloping Nadia/Hecuba, the dog stands defiant. The goddess Hera was responsible for transforming Hecuba into a dog to protect her following her confrontation with Agamemnon. The dog represents both the young Otis’ favourite screen character — a source of comfort and reassurance to him — and the defiance of Hecuba. In an interview published as the production opened in 2024, Tiago Rodrigues referred to Hecuba’s fight “as similar to that of a rabid dog. She won’t let go, she is driven by a fury that will not die until her son has been saved”. Hecuba becomes an image of the defiant mother – protecting her vulnerable child.
Four tables are moved into different configurations by the cast of seven. José António Tenente’s costumes, in different shades of black merge the classical and the contemporary – they are as layered as the play Rodrigues has created with his cast. There is a rack of clothes at the back of the stage left where the performers can pick up the robes; when they are not part of the action, they sit at the back and watch as the court case unfolds. We are invited as audience members to watch and listen. This is theatre as a space for engagement and democracy, much as the ancient Greek theatre from which it takes its story was meant to be. The new vision statement for the festival articulates Grec 2025 as “born with the aim of putting the multifaceted gaze of artists at the service of the public and the city” with the festival as “a meeting space” ….. “whose programme highlights the performing arts as a critical and poetic tool”. Hécube, pas Hécube provides a good example of that programming vision in action.
Based on the experiences of Natache Kotuchoumov, a former director of the Comédie de Genéve, who had previously worked with Rodrigues, Hécube, pas Hécube demonstrates the research-led approach to crafting work that distinguishes this Portuguese theatremaker. Here working with the Comédie Française for the first time, Rodrigues configures a play (translated by Thomas Resendes) that exists between and betwixt different worlds, different epochs and different theatrical traditions. Having seen Tiago Rodrigues’ newest production La Distance in Avignon but a week earlier — another reflection on parents and children, this time set in a dystopian 2077 future — I am struck by the timely nature of his vision of theatre as a space for different views to come into discussion: the intimate and the epic in a world in motion.
Play Dead played at Mercat de les Flors as part of the Grec Festival, 28 and 29 July 2025; Hécube, pas Hécube, played at the Grec teatre, 28 and 29 July 2025, and can be seen at Le 13e Art – Théâtre de la place d’Italie, Paris (France), 21 March – 2 May 2026. La distance opened at the Avignon festival on the 7 July 2025, it is now touring until June 2026.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Maria Delgado.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
