Soiree: Luc Bondy

He was the exception. He remains the exception. Viewed historically Luc Bondy belongs to the 1968 generation of directors, he was however five to ten years younger than those other warriors of theatrical re-birth and considered a sort of adopted child by the nomenclature of the time.  nitially in the mid- seventies, he was employed by Peter Palitzsch and Hans Neuenfels at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, then gradually he began working at Peter Stein’s Berliner Schaubühne, was brought by Jürgen Flimm to Schauspiel Köln, and invited by Chéreau to his Nanterre theatre in Paris. It always appeared however that these leading directors were playing the role of the caring older brother.

The qualities attributed to the delicate star-director were of a poetical ephemeral nature: a fascinating being, as if an ethereal will o’ the wisp was at large in German theatrical life; he was weightless, virtually untouchable.

»Of all the people that I met, you are the one who made me feel at the very least an immortality, or perhaps it was just a piteous earthy heaviness: you seemed to me to be more like an innocent-funny-all knowing angel, who perhaps because of that played around with all actuality, and danced with it more than the (we) others,« wrote Peter Handke to the director more than 20 years ago.

And those productions! Luc Bondy is completely undogmatic. To him dogmatism is always abhorrent. Bondy is permanently on the look out for its antithesis, he is unpredictable, he seduces with humour, with literature, with his theatre. He never imposes his point of view on a character, nor indeed on an author. Bondy plays with his characters in the literal sense, because neither he nor his actor know how the play is going to end. It is this openness that lends Bondy’s productions an eroticism, an openness to life, which allows the audience to view even the oldest warhorses of the theatrical repertoire in a new light. Maybe Lear and his daughters might be reconciled at the end of the play?

Bondy’s speedy changes from closeness to distance constitute one of his essential working principles. During rehearsals »he moves constantly between the stage and the director’s desk« (Michel Piccoli); at the same time he is always searching for moments of change – he converses with an acquaintance, looks at a costume – in order return to a sentence refreshed and with renewed intensity, able to find new aspects to a turn of phrase.

Thanks to this gift he has never become unfashionable. And fortunately neither was he ever en vogue.