Genre / City	Musical Theatre / Avignon
Dates	2 May at 14:00, 3 May at 11:00
Venue	at Shizuoka Arts Theatre
Duration	60 minutes
Language	In French with Japanese subtitles
seat	Reserved seating
Text, direction and music	Olivier PY
Production	Festival d’Avignon

Introduction

An operetta with live on-stage music that presents a fascinating world based on Grimm’s fairy tale, “Maid Maleen.”

The latest work in SPAC’s popular “Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Olivier PY” series presents the German brothers’ story of Maid Maleen, a beautiful and cheerful princess in love with a prince from the neighboring country. When she asks her father for permission to marry, though, he refuses and locks her up in a tower for seven years — after which she manages to escape, only to find that war has ravaged the land. Why did that happen? Where is her family? And where is her beloved prince? To answer these questions, the intrepid princess embarks on a remarkable and dangerous quest.
In “Love Triumphant,” the actors sing and play instruments on stage including a piano and cello, while — as fans of this series might expect — the stage sets and costumes by Pierre-André WEIZ also play a dramatic role in a production that’s sure to mesmerize audiences again with the theatre magic of Olivier PY.

Synopsis

A princess is in love with a prince from a neighboring country that her father is set on invading to enrich his own. If she and the prince marry, the princess thinks it will lead to a peace settlement between the two countries. However, her father refuses to grant his permission and has her locked up in a tower when she refuses to marry another man of his choosing. Seven years later, when she escapes from the tower, war has ravaged the land. Yet the princess’s enduring love leads her to the prince’s palace. But then …

Director’s Profile

Olivier PY
Born in Grasse in 1965, Olivier Py came to Paris after secondary school. After a year of khâgne at the lycée Fénelon, he joined the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in 1987 while also studying theology. The next year, he wrote his first play, Des Oranges et des Ongles (Of Oranges and Nails), and founded the company L’inconvénient des boutures. In 1995, he made his mark on the Festival d’Avignon with his direction of his text The Servant, a cycle of plays lasting twenty-four hours. In 1997, he became director of the Centre dramatique national d’Orléans, which he left in 2007 for the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. In 2013, he became the first theatre director to be named director of the Festival d’Avignon since Jean Vilar. A director for the theatre, the opera, and the cinema, but also an actor and poet, Oliver Py is a prolific author. As a politically-minded artist, he has directed many plays at the heart of which lies the political word, like Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, and The Persians, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as personal texts like Les Vainqueurs (The Victors), Orlando, or the Impatience, or Die Sonne for the Volksbühne. Every since Le Cahier noir (The Black Notebook), a first novel written when he was seventeen and published in 2015, he has written many texts in many different genres: plays, children’s fiction, essays, introductions, translations, screenplays, etc. In 2017 he adapted one of his novels for the stage for the second time after Excelsior (Hacia la alegria) with The Parisians; he also showed the audience of the Festival d’Avignon a little-known aspect of his work with Hamlet and Antigone, two plays performed by inmates from the Avignon-Le Pontet prison in which he has led a drama workshop for over five years. In 2018, he wrote and directed Pure Present, a tragic and contemporary trilogy which, for the first time in his career, directly tackled the question of the world of finance and of the dehumanisation of markets. As a follow-up, he started writing an operetta based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, a show aimed at children telling them to believe in their desires. Love Triumphant will be performed at the 73rd edition of the Festival d’Avignon with very little technical means, a theatre at once uncompromising and full of lyricism and hope. Regardless of the place, regardless of the stage, Olivier Py regularly speaks about cultural policy in France and throughout the world, against the rise of extremism and the restriction of liberties, and for greater social justice as well as a renewed sense of hospitality.

Related Event

◎An interchange session between the artists and children: 3 May at Café Cinderella, Shizuoka Arts Theatre
Entrance free (Please make reservations in advance)

Talks

◎Pre-performance talk: Starting 25 minutes before each performance
◎Post-performance talk by the artists: 2 May

Cast / Staff

Text, direction and music: Olivier PY
Stage design, costumes and make up: Pierre-André WEITZ
Light: Bertrand KILLY
Musical arrangements: Antoni SYKOPOULOS

Cast: Damien BIGOURDAN, Clémentine BOURGOIN, Pierre LEBON, Antoni SYKOPOULOS

Stage set construction: Ateliers du Festival d’Avignon
Costumes confection: Ateliers de l’Opéra de Limoges

Production: Festival d’Avignon
Co-production: Opéra de Limoges, Opéra de Lausanne, Scène nationale du Sud-Aquitain (Bayonne), Théâtre Georges-Leygues (Villeneuve-sur-Lot)

With the help of Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe
Residency: La FabricA du Festival d’Avignon

Created on July 5th, 2019 in the frame of the 73rd Festival d’Avignon

Subtitle translation: NISHIO Sachiko
Interpretation: HIRANO Akihito
Production:TAKABAYASHI Rie, YUKIOKA Jun

Notice

●Shizuoka Arts Theatre has a special room with seats for three adults with pre-school children. To see a performance from there, please contact our ticket center* to make a reservation.
●On Saturday, 2 May, GRANSHIP volunteers from Shizuoka Convention & Arts Center will provide free childcare at GRANSHIP during the performance for pre-school children aged 2 years and over. To make a reservation, please contact our ticket center* by 19 April.
*For your request mail to mail@spac.or.jp with following information;
title: RSV special room or free childcare
text:
Name of Parent
Name of Child
Age / Gender of Child
Contact of Parent
Any Special Notes