Valérie Dréville stages memory in Avignon

Vedène – July 14, 2026: The story begins with a person trying to escape memory and ends in a space where it can no longer be silenced. Standing alone on the stage of L’Autre Scène du Grand Avignon at the Avignon Festival, Valérie Dréville carries a family, a century, and its wounds. Her solo work “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” is an intense theatrical exploration of loss and inheritance.

The original work is by French writer Camille de Toledo. The novel follows a man called Theseus who sets off with three boxes of archives after his brother’s suicide and the deaths of his parents. He is searching for a place without a past. But documents, photographs, and the voices of ancestors, when only lightly touched, open a window onto a history that begins as private and extends to Europe’s political catastrophes.

Dréville adapted and staged this material together with Belgian director Guy Cassiers. Cassiers is known for visual theatre in which video, sound, and acting do not sit side by side decoratively, but shape a nervous memory. On stage, the actress is surrounded by archival material and projected images. The family album appears not as a soothing keepsake, but as a labyrinth. Each photograph promises origin while simultaneously calling it into question.

The form of the evening is a polyphonic solo. Dréville does not merely switch between characters. She lets the novel’s many voices resonate without flattening them. Poetry, reports, and photographic traces connect to a story about Jewish family history, grief, and the transmission of experience. Above all, the question of what violence and loss continue to live on in bodies, gestures, and silences gives this production its quiet power.

The title evokes the mythical Theseus, the man of the labyrinth. But what interests Cassiers and Dréville is not a heroic exit, but the harshness of looking back. Theseus cannot leave the past behind because it is inscribed in his present. It is an old idea that has lost none of its urgency in the face of 20th-century European history.

For Dréville, this production is also another important milestone in her long connection with Avignon. Having worked with Antoine Vitez, Claude Régy, and Anatoly Vasiliev, the actress possesses a particular precision for texts that reject easy univocality. “Thésée, sa vie nouvelle” will be performed in Vedène until July 24. It is a theatrical work that does not send its audience away with answers, but with images that linger for a long time.