Vilar, Jean (1912–1971)

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VILAR, JEAN (1912–1971)

French actor, director, and founder of the Avignon Festival.

Born in Sète, France, Jean Vilar began as a student of literature but was influenced by the leading French actor and director Charles Dullin to study acting at Dullin's academy, the Atelier. During World War II he toured France with a traveling company, Roulette, in which he began to attract attention, but his first major success, both as an actor and as a director, was in his production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, presented at the Vieux Colombier theater in Paris in 1945. This production gained Vilar an invitation to Avignon in 1947, where his production of Shakespeare's Richard II, a play almost unknown in France, was a triumph; its production, with minimal scenery on an open-air stage, did much to establish the style of Avignon Festival productions. With the strong financial and technical support of the municipality of Avignon, Vilar followed Richard II with two other productions, with such success that in July of the following year Vilar established an annual festival, with emphasis upon innovative production of unusual dramatic work, both classic and contemporary. Critics and an enthusiastic young audience filled the festival seats, making the Avignon Festival a cultural mecca that became the French equivalent of Germany's Bayreuth. Indeed in these early years the audience members were often referred to as Avignon "pilgrims."

Vilar was joined in 1951 by the popular stage and film actor Gérard Philipe, who took the leading roles in that season's major productions, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid and Heinrich von Kleist's The Prince of Homburg. Vilar's production in 1951 of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage was the beginning of Brecht's major reputation in France. That same year, Vilar was invited to Paris to direct the state Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), which had been founded thirty years before by the pioneering actor and director Firmin Gémier and was a central element in the French government's interest through much of the twentieth century in providing theater to a more general public. The huge (2,590-seat) Palais de Chaillot, which housed the TNP, was in an elegant section of Paris, not easily accessible to working-class audiences, but Vilar assiduously developed a more broad-based public by touring productions to working-class suburbs, even staging mini-festivals there, by lowering prices, eliminating tipping and cloakroom charges, serving inexpensive food and drink, enlisting the aid of trade unions in publicizing productions, and encouraging audience involvement through public lectures and post-performance discussions.

Vilar remained as director of the TNP until 1963, producing fifty-seven plays, thirty-five of which he directed and in twenty of which he assumed the leading role. His company included many of the leading French actors of this generation, among them Gérard Philipe, Jeanne Moreau, Daniel Sorano, and Georges Wilson. The repertoire tended toward large-scale works, befitting the venue, but staged in very simplified settings, as at Avignon. Vilar presented the French classics from Corneille to Henry Montherlant and a wide range of European classics, including works by Shakespeare, Luigi Pirandello, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Brecht, and Anton Chekhov. In 1959 the minister of culture André Malraux placed Vilar also in charge of the much smaller and more intimate Théâtre Récamier, where he presented smaller and more experimental work such as Boris Vian's The Empire Builders and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. During the early 1960s, against the backdrop of the Algerian War, the choice of plays became distinctly more political: Sophocles' Antigone, Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, Calderon's The Mayor of Zalamea, and Aristophanes' Peace.

When in 1963 Vilar was unable to negotiate a better contract with the government he resigned from the TNP and returned to Avignon, "back to his sources," as he put it, where he resumed direction of the festival. During the events of May 1968 he protested the severe measures of the government against student and worker protests by informing Malraux, who had appointed him to examine the possibility of creating a national popular opera comparable to the TNP, that he would no longer accept any official governmental post. His attempts to convert the 1968 festival into a center for productive political discussion were rejected by both the Right and the Left, and that season was a low point in Avignon Festival history. By the time Vilar died three years later, however, the festival had regained its momentum and remains one of the most important continuing annual theater events in Europe.

See alsoTheater.