Falk Richter
& Stanislas Nordey

Author and director associated with the Schaubühne of Berlin, Falk Richter pursues an original approach on the European theatre landscape. Without neglecting the classic repertory, he favours contemporary authors who cast a scathing look at our society like Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Jon Fosse and Lars Nóren. A critical vein he also mines by himself, as Falk Richter is one of the rare German directors today to stage his own dramatic works. Plays in which he engages in an uncompromising analysis of the liberal system, carrying us into the deepest part of our contradictions, our desires and our fears. Presented at the 2008 Festival d'Avignon with The System directed by Stanislas Nordey, his political theatre very directly questions the spectator to speak to him about today's world with fearsome lucidity, efficiency and humour.

Theatre and opera director, actor and pedagogical director of the École du Théâtre national de Bretagne, Stanislas Nordey is a man of the stage. Each of his facets allows him to find artistic balance: the director has the public discover texts, the actor physically gives himself to the play, the pedagogue handles the duty of transmission. Readily recognising himself in the expression: "director of actors", his stagings show the essential place that the actor has for him: stripped bare, they concentrate on gesture and speech in order not to impose a single reading on the spectator, but to leave him all his freedom to build his own vision of the play. Apart from The System, premiered in 2008, Stanislas Nordey was at the Festival d'Avignon with Hervé Guibert's Fly My Dragon in 1994, Contention-the Dispute and Other Trifles by Didier-Georges Gabily and Marivaux in 1997, and he acted in Skies by Wajdi Mouawad in 2009.

JFP, April 2010