Lung cancer finally took him from us on Monday, October 7. A natural heir to Berthold Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Orson Welles, and Jean Vilar all at once, he managed the exceptional feat of marrying intelligence with popularity. Who has not seen his film La Reine Margot with almost 2 million cinema admissions? What music lover has not seen at least extracts from his legendary Centennial Ring? Under his direction, the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre won a nationwide reputation and opened an acting school that rivals the Conservatoire in quality.
When Chéreau arrived in Paris in May , Chéreau was no mere beginner in suburban drama: he had already managed the Théâtre de Sartrouville at the young age of twenty-two, and made a name for himself through his choices of plays, making their political content even more potent through his direction.
The story of a well-born girl who becomes a prostitute for soldiers under the blind gaze of her father was in phase with the agitation of the late sixties and made him the young director of the moment. At the end of Das Rheingold , when Wotan leads the unwilling gods toward Walhalla, with Loge appearing as the curtain falls, it was a scandal: the Rhine turned into an abandoned dam, the maidens into harlots, Loge into a wandering Jew who plots the whole drama behind the scenes, with the decadent gods unable to do anything to forestall the tragedy.
This was unbearable to Bayreuth regulars. Inheritor of the festival, Wagner wanted to give it a breath of fresh air by inviting some of the most promising directors in Europe: Götz Friedrich, Heiner Müller, Peter Hall, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, among others. The abandoned dam? The misshapen Nibelungs, dressed as miners?
This was all a legacy from the Industrial Revolution, the cause of dehumanisation according to Chéreau, in a Wagnerian perspective. Goodbye, all you Siegfrieds clad in animal skins, all you Rhine Maidens dangling from the arches. The boos of were followed by more than an hour of applause after the fifth and latest revival of the production in A page had been turned.
