Valérie Dréville turns memory into theatre in Avignon

Bédoin – July 14, 2026: The story begins with a person trying to escape memory and ends in a space where memory can no longer be silenced. Valérie Dréville stands alone on the stage of L’Autre Scène du Grand Avignon at the Avignon Festival, yet carries with her an entire family, a century, and that century’s wounds. Her solo performance “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” is a dense theatrical exploration of loss and transmission.

The original work was written by the French author Camille de Toledo. His novel follows a man called Theseus who leaves with three boxes full of archives after his brother’s suicide and the death of his parents. He seeks a place without a past. Yet the documents, photographs, and voices of his ancestors open a window onto history that moves from a private story to Europe’s political catastrophes, almost untouched.

Dréville adapted and staged the work together with Belgian director Guy Cassiers. Cassiers is known for a visual language in which video, sound, and acting are not placed side by side as decoration, but construct unsettled memory. On stage, the actor is surrounded by archival material and projections. The family album appears not as an object of comforting remembrance, but as a labyrinth. Each image promises roots while simultaneously calling them into question.

The form of the performance is a polyphonic monologue. Dréville does not merely move between characters; she makes the novel’s many voices audible without flattening them. Poetry, archives, and photographic traces come together in a story about Jewish family history, mourning, and the transmission of experience. Above all, the question of what remains alive in bodies, gestures, and silences after violence and loss gives the production its quiet force.

The title evokes the mythical Theseus, the man in the labyrinth. But what interests Cassiers and Dréville is less the heroic way out than the harsh demand to look back at the past. Theseus cannot leave his past behind, because it is inscribed in his present. It is an old idea, but one that has lost none of its urgency when considering the history of 20th-century Europe.

For Dréville, this production is also another important milestone in her long relationship with Avignon. The actor, who has worked with Antoine Vitez, Claude Régy, and Anatoly Vassiliev, has a particular precision for texts that resist easy, singular interpretations. “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” runs in Bédoin until July 24. The play does not send audiences away with answers, but with images that resonate for a long time.