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New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67
Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario whose transformation of a derelict London lecture hall into the cutting-edge Almeida Theater was the opening act in a long career as one of the world's most eminent performing arts leaders, died on Friday night in Beijing. He was 67. His death, while he was in China for meetings related to future productions, was announced on social media by Rachida Dati, the minister of culture in France, where Mr. Audi had been the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018. Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, which opened in 1980 and swiftly became a center of experimental theater and music. He spent 30 years as the leader of the Dutch National Opera, and for part of that time was also in charge of the Holland Festival. For the past decade, he had been the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. All along, he continued working as a director at theaters around the world. Last year, when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels cut ties with Romeo Castellucci halfway through his new production of Wagner's four-opera 'Ring,' the company turned to Mr. Audi as one of the few artists with the knowledge, experience and cool head to take over such an epic undertaking at short notice. 'He profoundly renewed the language of opera,' Ms. Dati wrote in her announcement, 'through his rigor, his freedom and his singular vision.' Pierre Raymond Audi was born on Nov. 9, 1957, in Beirut, Lebanon, to Andrée (Fattal) Audi and Raymond Audi. His father worked for the family bank, which was founded in the mid-19th century. Mr. Audi was raised in Paris and in Beirut, where he started a cinema club at school and invited directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jacques Tati to speak. In a 2016 interview with The New York Times, he spoke about the formative influence of Middle Eastern storytelling traditions on his work. 'Coming from the place I come from, a story is the start of everything,' he said. 'Through 20th-century music, I discovered the chaos, which is the other side. I think my life is about working a path through those contradictions.' He was educated at the University of Oxford, where he directed a production of Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' in 1977. A few years before, Mr. Audi had led a group that purchased an early-19th-century building in the Islington neighborhood of London that, over its varied history, had housed a display of Egyptian mummies and served as a music hall, a Salvation Army facility and a factory that made carnival novelties. By the time Mr. Audi discovered it, it had fallen into disrepair. But he saw its potential as a performance venue, and he led a fund-raising effort to renovate it and reopen it as a theater with a few hundred seats. (He would later link his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.) Through the 1980s, the Almeida developed a hip reputation, with homegrown and touring productions that offered early boosts to the careers of now-prominent artists like Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner and Simon McBurney. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music became renowned as a presenter of new and commissioned operas. During his tenure at the Dutch National Opera, beginning in 1988, the house also became a hotbed of commissions and progressive stagings, including collaborations with visual artists like Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. There, Mr. Audi directed the Netherlands' first full production of the 'Ring' and a cycle of Monteverdi's operas. 'The thing about Pierre was, it wasn't going to be traditional, old-fashioned opera,' said the opera administrator Matthew Epstein, who advised Mr. Audi during that early period. 'It was the expanding of the repertoire both backward — toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for — and forward, toward so much contemporary opera.' Mr. Audi is survived by his wife, the artist Marieke Peeters; his children, Alexander and Sophia; his brother, Paul Audi; and his sister, Sherine Audi. In Aix-en-Provence, Mr. Audi was able to present just one season before the pandemic hit. In 2020, when the festival's performances were canceled, he managed to hold rehearsals for 'Innocence,' a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021. His true gift was as a presenter, guiding works to the stage like 'Innocence,' widely acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century. Mr. Audi's own stagings tended to look timeless and stylized. They could feel a tad bland, but they also had an appealing modesty, showcasing the music and performers while his own work receded into the background. When he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2010, with Verdi's 'Attila,' a collaboration with the fashion designer Miuccia Prada and the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that the production was 'not entirely successful, and sometimes weird' but was 'intriguing and full of resonant imagery.' Mr. Audi had a flair for the kind of event-driven presenting that reigns at festivals like Aix and raw spaces like the Armory, where he hosted longtime collaborators like William Kentridge and Peter Sellars; wrapped seating around the New York Philharmonic for a performance of Saariaho pieces; and brought spectacles like Claus Guth's 2023 staging of Schubert songs, which filled the Drill Hall with field-hospital beds. In 2019 in Amsterdam, he put on a three-day bonanza of chunks from Karlheinz Stockhausen's 29-hour, seven-opera cycle, 'Licht,' including Stockhausen's most notorious invention: a string quartet playing in helicopters. Last year, he brought to the Armory a smaller (and helicopter-free) selection, a surprisingly elegant, restrained show of lighting effects and immersive sound. In 2022, a half-century after he stumbled on the building that became the Almeida, Mr. Audi opened another new-old venue, for the Aix Festival: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive, graffiti-strewn black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a Provençal hilltop for more than two decades. 'I saw the height of it,' he said, 'and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.' Mr. Audi took a risk, planning the first production in the stadium without knowing whether its renovation would be ready in time, and without conducting an acoustic test in the space. But 'Resurrection,' Mr. Castellucci's staging of Mahler's Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave, was both sober and thrilling, the kind of music theater you couldn't find anywhere else. Mr. Audi didn't rest on his laurels after that. As always, he tried something different. In 2023, he presented a trio of films accompanying Stravinsky's epochal early ballets, played live with orchestra. 'The important thing,' he said soon after 'Resurrection' opened, 'is not to imitate what we did this year.'
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Abortion Scene Gets Theater Audiences Talking, and Fainting
About 40 minutes into a recent performance of 'The Years' in London, Stephanie Schwartz suddenly felt ill and had to put her head between her legs. Onstage at the Harold Pinter Theater, the actress Romola Garai was holding two knitting needles while portraying a young Frenchwoman trying to give herself an abortion. The scene was set in 1964, a time when medical abortions were illegal in France, and Garai's character wasn't ready for motherhood. Schwartz, 39, said she had started feeling faint as Garai's character, Annie, described her attempt to carry out the procedure in stark, if brief, detail. But then, Schwartz recalled, there was a commotion in the balcony above. An audience member had actually passed out. Since opening last summer for a short run at the Almeida Theater, then again last month on the West End, 'The Years' has been the talk of London's theaterland. That has as much to do with audience reactions to the six-minute abortion scene as the near-universal critical acclaim that the production and its five actresses received for their powerful portrayal of one woman's life. While fainting theatergoers are nothing new — several passed out over the onstage torture in Sarah Kane's 'Cleansed' at the National Theater almost a decade ago — the sheer number keeling over at 'The Years' stands out. Sonia Friedman, the show's producer, said that at least one person has fainted at every performance despite a warning to ticketholders. Friedman said that she realized the scene's power, especially at a time when many women, particularly in the United States, fear a rollback of reproductive rights. After failing to carry out the home abortion, Annie describes her visit to a backstreet clinic, then, later, miscarrying the fetus at home. Still, Friedman said she worried that the scene had overtaken discussion about a play that portrayed women's lives in all their 'power, pain and joy.' 'What should dominate the discussion,' Friedman said, 'is, 'Why has it taken this long for such a work about women, by women, to be onstage?'' Based on a 2008 autobiographical book of the same title by Annie Ernaux, the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 'The Years' is an attempt to not just capture a woman's life, but also show France's shift toward sexual liberation and consumerism. Eline Arbo, the play's director, said that, when she read the book, she immediately wanted to bring its blend of emotional, political and social history to the stage, even if Ernaux's writing contained no dialogue. 'Everybody thought I was crazy,' Arbo said. She didn't think twice about including the abortion scene. It was such a key moment in Ernaux's life, Arbo said (Ernaux almost bled to death), adding that it was vital to remind audiences of the importance of legal abortion. Garai said she performed the abortion scene when she auditioned for the show, and had felt it was a 'great, accurate depiction' of something that many women experienced when abortion was illegal. 'It's their bodies, their histories,' Garai said. During rehearsals, Garai recalled Arbo mentioning that a handful of audience members had fainted when the director staged the show in the Netherlands. But Garai said she had dismissed the possibility of similar reactions in London. British theatergoers, Garai recalled thinking, were used to sitting through bloody productions of Shakespeare. Yet, two days after the play opened at the Almeida Theater, the stage manager rushed onstage mid-performance and stopped the show. Someone had fainted. The cast feared they had traumatized a woman who had experienced an abortion, but it soon became clear there was no pattern: Men were fainting, as well as women. Perhaps the summer heat was a contributing factor? But now that the play was running on the West End, during a bitterly cold winter, the fainting was 'even worse,' Garai said. (The run concludes April 19.) Arbo said that her best theory for the reactions was that the show's stripped-back style left room for audiences to imagine the abortion themselves, and so increased the scene's intensity. Really, though, she said, she had no idea why West End audiences were fainting. 'Do you have an answer?' she asked. 'I don't!' During a recent performance, the show, meant to run almost two hours without intermission, was stopped twice for about five minutes so that ushers could attend to flustered theatergoers. Other audience members said they had mixed feelings about those interruptions. Mary Tyler, 65, a retired management consultant, sighed when the play was first halted. 'You are joking,' she said. 'That is so rude to the performers.' When the play stopped a second time, Chi Ufodiama, 35, a public relations worker, said she was sympathetic if someone who had experienced abortion was struggling, but she was 'suspicious' that the pauses were a deliberate part of the show. (Garai dismissed that notion: 'Why would we do that?') During each pause, Garai walked to the back of the stage and formed a circle with the other four woman playing Annie at different points in her life: Anjli Mohindra, Harmony Rose-Bremner, Gina McKee and Deborah Findlay. Garai said the cast had decided to remain onstage partly to signal to the audience that the play was about women's communal experience. 'We're all here to tell the rest of this story together,' she said. Once ushers had ensured the audience member was all right (they sometimes provide bottles of water or medical assistance), Garai returned to the front of the stage and continued acting as intensely as before, without missing a word. It was no different than having a director interrupting her mid-rehearsal, Garai said. Within minutes of enduring the abortion, her character had moved on from that moment: She gets married, becomes a mother, and soon the play was racing through a divorce and other scenes that shed light on women's lives. Some were comedic, like a moment when McKee, playing Annie in middle age, attends her first aerobics class. Other scenes were more passionate, including one in which Findlay, portraying Annie in her 50s and 60s, describes an affair with a younger man. For Garai, that May-December romance was as strong a statement as the abortion. Garai said it showed that older women 'not only can desire, but can be objects of desire,' adding she had never seen such a relationship on a London stage before. Even for Schwartz, the audience member who felt she came close to fainting, the play's broader messages struck home. She said certain moments made her ponder what past generations of women lived through, as well as reflect on her own life experiences and those of her friends. The play was 'such a relatable depiction of womanhood,' Schwartz added, and that meant it had to include the abortion scene, too.
