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OPERA

Swiss theatre director Luc Bondy dies in France

Luc Bondy, an influential Swiss director who produced dozens of theatre and operatic works in Europe over four decades, died on Saturday aged 67, Paris' prestigious Théâtre de l'Odéon, where he was director, announced.

Published: 29 November 2015 15:06 CET
Swiss theatre director Luc Bondy dies in France
Luc Bondy at press conference for one his productions in 2013. Photo: AFP

Born in Zurich and brought up in Switzerland and France, he had been dogged by ill health for much of his life.
   
He started his career in Germany, taking charge of the Berlin Schaubuehne theatre and overseeing the Vienna Festival before returning to Paris three years ago.
   
Bondy directed a wide range of some 60 plays and 16 operas across Europe.
   
He turned his hand expertly from anything to Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere and Marivaux.
   
He also won renown for operatic productions, notably of works by Monteverdi, Benjamin Britten, Verdi and Mozart.
   
President Francois Hollande said Bondy had “incarnated cultural Europe through his personal history and exceptional work.”
   
Bondy suffered poor health since having to fight off cancer from the age of 25.

The illness would return to ravage him several times and, in 2009, he had to oversee rehearsals with the Paris Opera from a bed placed stageside.
   
“I always acted as if there was nothing untoward — I lived, I enjoyed myself,” he once said.
   
Bondy was married to Swiss producer Marie-Louise Bischofberger and father to twins.

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PARIS

Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends

French actors, stage technicians and other members of the performing arts ended a more-than-two-month occupation of the famous Odéon theatre in Paris on Sunday, allowing the show to go on after this week's easing of Covid-19 curbs.

Published: 23 May 2021 15:58 CEST
Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends
A picture taken on January 26, 2011 in Paris shows the facade of the Odéon theatre. LOIC VENANCE / AFP

The protesters took down the banners they had slung across the facade of the venue in the Left Bank as they left at dawn, leaving just one inscribed “See you soon”.

“We’re reopening!,” theatre director Stéphane Braunschweig exclaimed on the venue’s website, adding that it was “a relief and a great joy to be able to finally celebrate the reunion of the artists with the public.”

The Odéon, one of France’s six national theatres, was one of around 100 venues that were occupied in recent weeks by people working in arts and entertainment.

The protesters are demanding that the government extend a special Covid relief programme for “intermittents” — performers, musicians, technicians and other people who live from contract to contract in arts and entertainment.

READ ALSO: Protesters occupy French theatres to demand an end to closure of cultural spaces

With theatres shut since October due to the pandemic, the occupations had gone largely unnoticed by the general public until this week when cultural venues were finally cleared to reopen.

The Odéon, which was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782, had planned to mark the reopening in style, by staging Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie”, with cinema star Isabelle Huppert as a former southern belle mourning the comforts of her youth.

But the protests scuppered the first five performances, with management saying the venue was blocked — a claim the protesters denied.

“What we wanted was for it (the performance) to go ahead, along with an occupation allowing us to speak out and hang our banners. We don’t want to stop the show,” Denis Gravouil, head of the performing arts chapter of the militant CGT union, said on Sunday.

Two other major theatres — the Colline theatre in eastern Paris and the National Theatre of Strasbourg — have also been affected by the protests.
 
France has one of the world’s most generous support systems for self-employed people in the arts and media, providing unemployment benefit to those who can prove they have worked at least 507 hours over the past 12 months.

But with venues closed for nearly seven months, and strict capacity limits imposed on those that reopened this week, the “intermittents” complained they could not make up their hours.

The government had already extended a year-long deadline for them to return to work by four months.

The “intermittents” are pushing for a year-long extension instead.

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