Philippe Quesne should be brimming with satisfaction. As artistic director of France’s biggest dramatic arts centre, Nanterre-Amandiers, since 2014, he has drawn ever-larger, ever-younger audiences for shows by artists such as Claude Régy, Joël Pommerat, Jérôme Bel and Milo Rau, all eked from a tiny 1.4-million euro (£1.19m) annual production budget, writes Andrew Todd in The Guardian.
His own work is feted around the world, except – astonishingly – in Britain. This autumn he pulled off the tour de force of hosting Jean-Luc Godard, who invested every nook and cranny of the dank, rickety Nanterre theatre building with myriad screenings of his major and minor works since the 1980s. You could see Woody Allen as the fool in King Lear in the theatre’s costume workshop, or outtakes of Patti Smith – on board the doomed Costa Concordia – in one of its corridors. Godard preferred this environment over the Pompidou Centre, which had offered him carte blanche.
However, Quesne (pronounced “kehn”), announced in July that Nanterre’s highly prized directorship was no longer tenable for him and he will step down next year. Quesne’s attempts to overhaul his crumbling building (never renovated since it was built in the 1970s) have revealed fault lines between a central government in retreat, and local powers overplaying their hands in the ensuing power vacuum. Nanterre – adjoining Europe’s biggest business district, La Défense – is Communist-run, and gives only 13% of the theatre’s budget, while owning the building. Local mayor (and development president of La Défense) Patrick Jarry has sniped constantly (despite the theatre’s palpable success, with 50% of its audience under 30) and – according to Quesne – compromised future programming by throwing spanners in the works, failing to support the transitional period during rebuilding. (Jarry has riposted that locally drawn audiences have decreased under Quesne’s tenure.) Hence – ultimately – the director’s bitter decision to move on.
Nanterre is not an isolated case: another Greater Paris mayor recently had the respected and buzzing Mains d’Oeuvres arts centre in Saint Ouen evacuated by the police. This followed the withdrawal of the town’s 90,000-euro annual subsidy in 2014, a move which fatally unbalanced the already fire-damaged centre. Greater Paris – attempting to construct a true metropolitan identity from 130 municipalities – seems destined to falter if its existing bright spots are allowed to be dimmed in this way.
The central government has reacted late or not at all in these cases, and is in retreat in general in the arts, formerly a bastion of French identity and politics. Theatre-loving Emmanuel Macron risks appearing withdrawn and Hamlet-like as things decline around him.
Irina Brook threw in the towel at the Théâtre National de Nice at about the same time as Quesne, after valiant efforts to make the live arts more inclusive and engaged. For Brook, it became clear that her desire for a responsible creative agenda – especially regarding the climate crisis – was incompatible with the constraints imposed by multiple funding bodies. Does this forebode a fall from grace of France’s much-envied cultural sector? Are artist-directors about to become obsolete, like the post-extinction, birdless scarecrows populating Quesne’s last show, Farm Fatale?
Quesne’s own directorial work is all about how we form institutions, with cowboys trying to found a museum of sublime landscape paintings (Caspar Western Friedrich), heavy rockers trying to make their own snowbound theme park (La Mélancolie des Dragons) and the survivors of a plane crash creating a new world on a polystyrene tropical island (Crash Park).