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

• “Le Passé” [The Past] had its world premiere in September 2021 at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. It is the first time that Julien Gosselin has directed a text from the previous century, as he has always focused on contemporary literary masterpieces, such as Roberto Bolaño’s “2666,” Michel Houellebecq’s “Les Particules élémentaires” (“The Elementary Particles”), and “Joueurs / Mao II / Les Noms,” based on three novels by Don DeLillo (“Players,” “Mao II,” and “Names”).

• Julien Gosselin was the first director to stage Michel Houellebecq’s “Les Particules élémentaires” as a theater play in France, at the Festival d’Avignon in 2013. This was the production that made him known to international audiences, before he had even turned 26.

• In Greece, we have seen his performances, “2666,” “Les Particules élémentaires,” and “1993,” as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival.

• Gosselin was looking for a work that would highlight a disintegrating early 20th-century society when the translator André Markowicz suggested that he read Leonid Andreyev, the unjustly forgotten Russian author who was at the height of his fame before the October Revolution. Gosselin says, “I wanted to tell a story of farewell. These people should not have been killed by the weapons of the revolution. They should have slowly faded away in the flow of events.”

• Through Andreyev’s work, “Ekaterina Ivanovna,” which forms the backbone of the play, Gosselin ‘edits’ into the main plot excerpts from other works by Andreyev, used as interludes or digressions, and pushes us on a wild journey: into the abyss of humanity, the underbelly of society, the concerns of theater, and the brink of non-existence. A performance with a fast-paced narrative and a searing plunge into life, society, theater, patriarchy, loneliness, and existence today. A bold and demanding condition that breaks forms and plays fearlessly with genres, ideas, and certainties. No one emerges unscathed from this experience.

• “Le Passé” draws on two plays and three short stories by Leonid Andreyev: “Ekaterina Ivanovna” (play, 1912), “Requiem” (play, 1916), “The Abyss” (short story, 1912), “In the Fog” (short story, 1902), and “The Resurrection of the Dead” (short story written between 1910 and 1914).

• In 2018, Gosselin returned to the Festival d’Avignon with the play “Joueurs / Mao II / Les Noms,” a nine-hour theatrical adaptation of three novels by Don DeLillo. It was his first work combining theater, performance, music, and live filming.

• “I can’t stand having an audience that sits comfortably in its ‘corner.’ I want the viewer to enter a universe, to jump into the water, to become part of the world I am creating during a performance, and to resurface only at the end. [...] I don’t want tourists who merely watch what’s happening on stage, but people who immerse themselves in the world unfolding before their eyes.”

• Gosselin draws inspiration from his childhood and teenage memories in the villages of northern France, where he discovered the authors of ‘loneliness’: Michel Houellebecq and Virginie Despentes. For him, sadness must find a place to express itself, to resonate, and to pervade everything.

• “The idea of the past was born within me even before I discovered Leonid Andreyev. It was an attempt to seek the distance of the past, not to approach it. […] Often, we don’t know why we do the performances, or rather, we know why we do them, but we don’t know exactly what we are doing. But now that I have staged quite a few performances, I can look back and see what I’ve done. And I realize that I was actually staging mainly novels, because they are written in the past tense; I only staged plays that spoke in the imperfect tense, which allowed me to explore this idea of the ‘future perfect tense.’ And the funny thing is that the first and only time I stage an old work, it’s also the first time I speak in the present tense.”—Julien Gosselin

• Reviews

“Brilliant in form, the performance rattles, strikes, shakes, and exhausts the viewer.”—Le Monde

“Julien Gosselin manages to immerse us in a world of melancholy and intense emotions, creating a unique theatrical experience.”—La Terrasse

Leonid Andreev was born in 1871 in Oriol, Russia. He lost his father very young and had a miserable childhood and youth. As a young adolescent, he laid down on railroad tracks just to check his own limits. He was not a crazy man, though, but a man who lived a crazy life.

His whole life and work were about going beyond the inherent limits of things. Many times, he risked his life; he attempted to his life several times and died in 1919 from heart failure—the outcome of his rail experience as a child.

In early 1900, his first publications were noticed by Maxime Gorky, with whom he was bound by both a sincere and tempestuous friendship, which broke up in 1907. Each one of his short novels is a gem.

At the time, each one of them induced scandals. However, “The Red Laugh” or “Vassili Fiveiski’s Life,” whose violence and dynamism are very close to fantasy in their descriptions, were tremendous successes. About forty plays were born from the hundred short stories he wrote during his life. Each one of them created a new form with a new impetus. His plays, mostly translated into German and English, were staged in the greatest Russian theaters in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg by the greatest directors, such as Stanislavski and Meyerhold, who brought about a revolution by adapting them.

In 1905, he called for regime change, and yet, year after year, he progressively withdrew from Bolshevik circles.

He strongly rejected the October 1917 coup d’état and died in exile. He published his works in 1912, although his last works remained uncollected. Today, the main part of his work still remains unobtainable in Russia.