Marion Cotillard, the ‘Joan of Arc’ who revives in the theater

The beautiful voice of the French actress Marion Cotillard has claimed Tuesday night for his innocence in Joan of Arc at the Stakea dramatic oratorio from 1935 by Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel that has filled the Teatro Real with cinema with a powerful and apocalyptic staging of The Fura dels Baus.

Film directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, sitting next to Aitana Sánchez Gijón, and Fernando León de Aranoa, as well as singers like Víctor Manuel and Ana Belén or actresses like Ángela Molina.

Together with the rest of the public, they have applauded Cotillard and the rest of the cast after a performance of just under two hours.

Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Cotillard is situated in an indeterminate and apocalyptic future imagined by Álex Ollé, from La fura dels Baus, to show the validity of the injustices and irrationality that ended the life of the young peasant girl in the 15th century.

Cotillard never leaves the stage in a performance that recreates a dirty, grimy and sordid world in contrast to the purity of the young protagonist and her divine visions. The actress first played this role in 2005 in Orleans as a relief for her mother, Niseema Theillaud.

“Joan of Arc is someone who follows her instincts and that led her to do extraordinary things. She had a faith stronger than the conventions that bound women. She took off her chains and went out to do what she wanted to do with extraordinary power and strength, ”the actress emphasized in the presentation of this work.

In addition to the spoken roles of Cotillard and Father Dominique (Sébastien Dutrieux), which review episodes from Joan of Arc’s past, the performances of the Virgin, Saint Marguerite (the Spanish sopranos Sylvia Schwartz and Elena Copons) and Saint Catherine ( Albanian mezzo-soprano Enkelejda Shkoza).

The young woman said that she had acted following their voices when she decided to lead an army to liberate Orleans in the Hundred Years War. She was finally tried for heresy and sentenced to death at the age of 19 for dressing like a man.

The innocence and strength of the maiden from Orleans has been taken to the movies dozens of times by directors such as Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer or Victor Fleming, who precisely directed Ingrid Bergman, the first to represent this dramatic oratorio in Spain at the Liceo de Barcelona.

Maestro Juan Mena has directed expressionist and post-Wagnerian music, mysticism, the most vulgar jazz and popular songs that were masterfully mixed by Honegger in the score he composed in 1935 with a libretto by the symbolist and Catholic poet Paul Claudel. He has highlighted the use of the martenot waves, one of the first electronic instruments invented.

In 1944 Claudel added a prologue that inserted the work in the historical moment of the Nazi invasion of France.

The choir has a special role in this work -considered an opera although it was composed denying this title- and occupies the stage. “It is one of the best choirs you can work with in the world and it is laudable that they sing what they sing with what I ask them to do”, he explained in the presentation of the work Ollé.

Indeed, the choir of the Teatro Real, directed by Andrés Máspero, and the Pequeños Cantores de la JORCAM have had a very physical performance, interpreting the jury and the mobs that ended up condemning Joan of Arc to die after fighting for the union of France.

The work has been preceded in perfect transition by the cantata “La damoiselle élue” (“The Blessed Maiden”), by Claude Debussy (1862-1918) on a libretto by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, starring soprano Camilla Tilling and mezzo-soprano Enkelejda Shkosa . (AND)