the violence of "Thyeste" tears the walls of the Court of Honor

It was still daylight when a swarm of children entered the Court of Honor on Friday, July 6th. Wearing white masks and black hair, they ran in all directions, and it could have been a joyful sarabande if words had not come to pierce her, like a sword sinking into a body. Terrible words, as never before were heard between the walls of the Palace of the Popes: those of Thyeste of Seneca, in a staging by Thomas Jolly, which is played until July 15 and which will make a date, and surely debate. François Hollande and Françoise Nyssen, the Minister of Culture, were in the stands, next to Olivier Py, the director of the festival, and he blew just enough mistral for the elements to be in, in a room where the sun reverses its course in broad daylight, so much is the world disturbed.

By what? Barbarism. Total, definitive, gross. Of those that make words miss, as Seneca himself says in his tragedy like no other, where the unspeakable is not shown, but related: Thyeste eats his three sons, that his brother Atrée killed, cut up and cooked, because they were born of the woman he loved and Thyeste took him. This could be enough to horror if Thyeste was not "pregnant" with his children, he feels moving in his bowels. Thus the will of the Tantalus curse, which has no limits, and to whom Seneca gives the black clothes of a language, extraordinarily translated by Florence Dupont, who refuses no rage and hesitates before nothing, nor the imprecation, neither commonplace nor sentimentalism.

Such a special piece rarely happens for no reason

There is a senseless excess in Thyeste and it very likely that only a director like Thomas Jolly could today immerse us in this universe where it is better to dismiss the question of why barbarism happens, to remember only that of how …