In brightly-coloured clothes, his hat screwed firmly on his head, Arlequin plays and plays light with everything and everyone. The Arlequin created by Olivier Py approaches theatre as others might approach life – with contagious enthusiasm. Now a pizza delivery boy, he crosses paths with Alcandre, a poète maudit who lives in seclusion in a shabby flat on the outskirts of the city. On the frontispiece of the stage are written the words “Quelque chose vient” [Something is coming]. Something is going to happen – a metamorphosis, the conquest of freedom. In this time-travelling story, divided into four chapters, Arlequin and his playmates attempt to demystify the world and overturn the established order. Ma jeunesse exaltée [My exalted youth] is an extraordinary, spring-loaded saga – ten hours of joyous and irreverent theatrical adventure.
Olivier Py joined the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in 1987. In 1995, he made his mark at the Festival d’Avignon with a production of his own work, La Servante, a cycle of plays lasting twenty-four hours. In 1997, he was made director of the Centre dramatique national d’Orléans, which he left in 2007 to direct the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. He was the director of the Festival d’Avignon from 2013 to 2022.
Olivier Py is a theatre and opera director, producer, poet, and prolific author. A socially committed artist, he has directed many plays in which politics is central to the theatrical narrative, including Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, and The Persians by Aeschylus, King Lear by Shakespeare, and personal texts such as Les Vainqueurs, Orlando ou l’Impatience and Die Sonne for the Volksbühne. In 2017, with Les Parisiens, the director adapted one of his novels for the stage for the second time after Excelsior (Hacia la alegria). In 2018, Olivier Py wrote and directed Pur présent, a tragic and contemporary trilogy which, for the first time in his work, tackles the financial logic and dehumanisation of the markets head-on. L’Amour vainqueur, a “theatre of poverty” in which uncompromising abruptness rubs shoulders with lyricism and hope, was staged at the 73rd Festival d’Avignon.
In 2023, Olivier Py was appointed director of the Théâtre du Châtelet.
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