The Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes already carries the memory of Avignon’s great nights. In 2026, Maldoror adds the promise of a dizzying stage experience. Credits: Jialiang Gao / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5.
The Avignon Festival 2026 will open on July 4 in the Cour d’honneur with Maldoror, the new production by Julien Gosselin. The premiere is announced as five hours long, with two short breaks. It mixes Roberto Bolaño and Lautréamont to question violence, evil, and what theater deliberately leaves offstage. The stake also lies in how a large stage transforms horror into an experience of looking.
A Long Opening For The 80th Edition
The choice is a signal. The 80th edition of the Avignon Festival is scheduled from July 4 to 25, 2026. For its opening, the Cour d’honneur will not host a short launch piece. It will present a marathon performance at 10 p.m., in the Avignon night. According to the official Avignon Festival information sheet, Maldoror will be performed on July 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. The play is in French, with English surtitles.
Practical information matters because it already says something about the ambition. Five hours of theater, two breaks, a monumental space, an edition opener: Julien Gosselin places Maldoror in the Avignon tradition of major traversals. The director returns to it ten years after 2666, his adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel. That production marked the Festival by its length and by how it held together narrative, stage, music and image.
This time, the official program announces a dialogue between Bolaño and Lautréamont. It is therefore not an isolated adaptation of the Chants de Maldoror alone. The editing sets two imaginaries of evil in response to one another. One comes from the 19th century, with Lautréamont’s dark and provocative figure. The other belongs to contemporary literature haunted by disappearance, investigation and mass violence.
The Reverse Shot As Central Question
The word that arises around the production is that of the reverse shot. In cinema, it denotes the image opposite a first framing. It is what a character looks at, what answers them, or what the scene does not yet show. For Maldoror, the issue is broader. Gosselin does not seem merely to use video as a tool to enlarge the stage; he makes it a question of perception.
The report published on June 30 by Libération, by Sonya Faure, describes rehearsals at the Ateliers Berthier of the Odéon. It emphasizes this work on image, framing and enclosed space. This source must be handled precisely. It documents a rehearsal moment, not the definitive result presented to the public on July 4.
The Festival, for its part, describes a setup combining theater, cinema and performance. The technical roster notably lists video creation, camera operators, music, lighting, dramaturgy and scenography. Two camera operators are announced, Jérémie Bernaert and Baudouin Rencurel. Their presence confirms that filmed image is not a mere backdrop, but an active component of the performance.
From these elements, the sketched architecture meets a dramaturgical question that is simple to state. It is harder to solve: how to show evil without illustrating it flatly? How to tell of human violence without turning it into a self-indulgent spectacle? The Festival’s presentation and the rehearsals described by Libération suggest a device that seeks less an answer than a disturbance of the gaze. The spectator would be placed before what they see, but also before what escapes them.
Bolaño, Lautréamont And The Making Of Evil
Lautréamont published Les Chants de Maldoror in the late 1860s under the name Isidore Ducasse. The text, long marginal then celebrated by the Surrealists, has retained its reputation as a rupture book. Its poetic prose remains violent, provocative, traversed by monstrosity, defiance of God and fascination with the abyss.
Bolaño, for his part, made investigation, wandering and literature instruments to approach zones of destruction. In his work, evil is not always contained in a character. It circulates in cities, narratives, archives, absent bodies. For Gosselin, who already confronted 2666 in Avignon, the meeting of the two writers opens theatrical material that is less narrative than magnetic.
In an interview published by La Terrasse, the project is presented as an advance into the human and literary mysteries of evil. The phrasing highlights the risk of the production: it is not enough to summon great dark texts to produce thought. The whole difficulty will be to give the stage a form that avoids both dissertation and an effect of stupefaction.
The Cour d’honneur reinforces this tension. Its verticality, its walls, its history and its media visibility impose a particular scale on the artists. The venue can magnify a proposal; it can also harden it, make it more frontal than it would be in an enclosed theater. For Gosselin, this constraint can become an advantage if image, music and duration truly organize a shift in the gaze.
A European Production, Beyond Avignon
The creation does not stop at the Avignon premiere. The production is carried by the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, with several co-producers listed. These include the Avignon Festival, the Comédie de Genève, the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens and Onassis Stegi in Athens. The Odéon announces a revival of the production in its 2026–2027 season. The Maison de la Culture d’Amiens also includes it in its touring program.
This circulation is important. It takes Maldoror beyond the Avignon event alone. It places it within a network of major European stages capable of hosting long and technically heavy forms. It also confirms that the production is conceived as an immediate repertory work. It does not function only as an opening coup for the Cour d’honneur.
The Festival also announces recordings on July 8 and 9. A broadcast on ARTE is planned for July 18 at 10:40 p.m., then on arte.tv. Again, the detail is not anecdotal. A work that works the relationship between stage and image will quickly be replayed by television and the platform. The reverse shot of Maldoror will therefore not concern only the spectators seated in the Cour d’honneur.
What Can Be Said Before The Premiere
At this stage, it would be premature to judge the artistic success of Maldoror. The public premiere has not yet taken place. One can nevertheless establish the terms of the appointment. There will be a festival opening, an exceptional duration, dark literary material and a director seasoned in monumental adaptations. The device also makes video a place of thought as much as a spectacular tool.
The Avignon Festival 2026 program thus places Maldoror in a delicate spot: between event, promise and trial. For spectators, the immediate question will also be concrete. The official sheet indicated, at the last check, that there were no online tickets available for the moment. This note may change and does not constitute a definitive announcement of unavailability.
The essential remains: Gosselin opens Avignon with a proposal that embraces excess without yet being able to claim its effect. That is precisely what makes the preview interesting. Even before critics can decide, Maldoror poses a theatrical question. What can the stage still do when it looks at evil askance? What can image, duration and the zones the spectator must accept not mastering still do?