For those who can, is currently playing at La Scala, in Paris, his Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, which he staged in 2022 in Lyon. For all, Alain Françon gives himself to be heard in this new series of interviews “A Naked Voice” conducted by Caroline Broué.

First episode, he summons his memories. His birth (in 1945) in a popular environment (he was raised by his grandparents who ran a bistro). Foot – already the sense of the collective. Studies – a master’s degree in art history, partly to reassure the family. And the theater, discovered through a friend, a student at the Saint-Etienne conservatory: “The theater is a shelter, a refuge from which, paradoxically, one can have a particularly acute view of reality, reality. »

Put yourself aside to think about what you want to say and, even more, how to say it: this is what moves Alain Françon when, in the next episode, Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil, Patrice Chéreau are invited and Roger Planchon, whose shows he saw first at the Comédie de Lyon then at the Théâtre de la Cité in Villeurbanne, the future TNP.

In 1971, Alain Françon founded the Théâtre exploded (a name borrowed from the writer and director Armand Gatti) which could be described as a militant theater of interventions and collective creations. The boards are then in turmoil: Jean-Pierre Vincent with his Théâtre de l’Espérance, Antoine Vitez and his Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry, the beginnings (1972) of the Autumn Festival. Alain Françon signs his first stagings: “I remember them physically. It was the first time I was back. An active withdrawal. A way of looking and looking for how to say. »

« The unconscious part »

Seeking how to say and do justice: subject of episode 3, undoubtedly the most fascinating because here we are plunged into the heart of the reactor, that is to say texts. Always as political, but less directly militant, Alain Françon talks at length about his meeting with Michel Vinaver, the playwright who died on May 1, 2022. A “golden man” with whom, he says – and this is not nothing – he really learn to read. “For me, Vinaver is the theater as it is, but obliquely, unlike Edward Bond [whom he will stage a lot and will largely contribute to making known] who did it frontally. Bond is leaving the theater hungry for change, that’s his motto. »

Vinaver, Bond and Chekhov: here are some of the contemporary authors that Alain Françon will stage at the Théâtre de la Colline, of which he takes the helm in 1996 and for fourteen years. Of the characters (a term he does not use, preferring “figures” for example) of Chekhov, he says: “They have no center, little is known of their lives. And immediately to clarify: “Even if there were, I would not use it (…) One of the things that, in the theater, does not suit me, is the interpretation. There is nothing to interpret, but rather to produce a text because, in producing, there are conscious and unconscious merged, and the unconscious part is really important. »

So important that he will come back to it in the last episode in which he will talk about listening, accidents, moments that must be welcomed. He will also say, to the delight of anyone who loves his theater, “If I keep going, it’s because I keep starting.” »