Le Passé | Julien Gosselin

“The future is the past,” declares Julien Gosselin, and in his first appearance at the Onassis Stegi, he invites us on a grand quest in search of lost time, humanism, and faith in beauty.

A director closely associated with the celebration of literature on stage since his early adaptations of Michel Houellebecq’s "The Elementary Particles" and Roberto Bolaño’s "2666", the now 38-year-old Gosselin draws inspiration for "Le Passé" from the short stories of Russian author Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919).

His goal: “a tribute to extinct art and humanity.” "Le Passé" opens with a failed femicide, includes a shocking scene in which the ideal of first love is dismantled, and traces a series of extremes committed in the name of love. And yet, the production is crafted as a work of art. Period costumes and scenes reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s cinema, lit by candlelight, unfold in a house that is built and collapses, just like the relationships of its inhabitants. Snow-covered landscapes, evocative of the Flemish Renaissance painter Brueghel, coexist with live filming of the cast, who deliver consistently intense performances in a wrenching farewell ritual to love and, by extension, to humanity.

Plays never originate from an idea. Instead, they result from a perfect blend between life, theater, things we want to achieve, and others we don’t. As we were rehearsing the previous show, “Players, Mao II, the Names” after Don DeLillo, I imagined staging a classic like “The Seagull,” and wrecking the performance and destroying the characters right after Treplev’s show—either by armed terrorists or by the progressive disappearing of people in costume on stage. At first, I thought this was once again the consequence of my anger against the world of theater, tradition, and the audience’s assumed expectations of something they already know, that is, the repertoire.

A few months later, I called translator André Markowicz on the phone. I explained that for the first time, I was looking for an old text and told him the story of an early 20th-century society dying out. I told him I was thinking about Gorky’s “Children of the Sun.” But Gorky is not really my cup of tea; it is too tough and physical for me. I didn’t wish to tell anger; I wanted to tell the story of a goodbye instead. These people should not be killed by the guns of revolution. They would slowly die out in the chain of events.

I thought of Houellebecq writing at the end of “The Map and the Territory”: “The triumph of nature is total.” I also thought of directors who stage classical texts. I thought of what people are accustomed to saying: “Playwrights are talking to us.” “Shakespeare is more modern than any other dramatists.” Then, I looked back on my work until today. Those contemporary texts I worked on as if they were lost, forgotten worlds, as if contemplated from the future, at a time when our societies are dead, and so is the world. Today, I think that the reason why we adapt classical texts is their distance from us, not their permanent quality.

We want to see again people who no longer exist, people who departed. We want to hear languages that were changed through time, we want to understand who we were and see the dead live again. This is precisely what I tried to explain to André Markowicz. I told him I wished to produce a show that would simultaneously speak about the coming extinction of humanity and the disappearance of classical theater. An acerbic and sincere goodbye to humanity and conventionalism.

He asked me: “Do you know Leonid Andreyev?” I didn’t at all. Reading his work was a total shock. It was the first time I had felt so humanely close to a long-departed author. Andreyev is very different from his contemporary authors. He wrote plays, short stories, and symbolic works. When reading Andreyev ’s work, words that can transfix you are found in all of his scenes, dialogues, sentences. As if we were able, with a few words, to touch the crucial heart of pain and beauty of the world.

I will work on several plays—“Requiem,” “Ekaterina Ivanovna”—and two short stories too: “In the Fog” and “The Abyss.” I will work with video, music, and a troupe composed of the same actors I’ve always been working with and some new ones, too.

The play will explore new ideas as I will work with paintings, chassis, candle footlights, ancient costumes that will coexist with the camera, glazed spaces, and today’s images. There will be painted landscapes, salons bourgeois, winter gardens, and musicians in the orchestra pit.

As in “Solaris,” Tarkovski’s shadow will hang over the show. Shots from his spaceship will follow pictures from one of Brueghel’s paintings depicting a crowd of peasants. Through Andreyev’s writing, my new show will draw a similar circle. One saying is that the future is the past. It will be a tribute to extinct art and humanity, to obscure times viewed from space when men used to walk in the snow as a group.

—Julien Gosselin, December 2020