ABSTRACT
Kristian Frédric (b. 1962 in Champagne of ‘a landlocked sailor and a housewife’) is one of France’s most passionate and non-conformist young theatre directors destined, as he says, ‘to look farther than the wheat fields of my home’ (Frédric 2009). He is drawn to contemporary works marked by extreme lyricism and extreme emotional violence: Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, 1994-5) and La Nuit juste avant les forêts (Night Just Before the Forests, 2000-4); Jean-Pierre Siméon’s Stabat Mater Furioso (2003-5) and Ya Basta (2004); Koffi Kwahulé’s Big Shoot (2005-7) and Daniel Keene’s Moitié, Moitié (Half and Half, 2007-8). His mises en scène are stunningly physical, sculptural and anguished. His varied career in the arts has taken him from technical work (lighting, stage managing, stage crew), notably at Paris’s Les Folies Bergères in the early 1980s, to assisting directors such as Jean-Louis Thamin, François Nocher, Pierre Romans, Yves Gourvil and Patrice Chéreau (a central influence on him) in the late 1980s and 1990s. Of working with Chéreau on Hamlet for the 1986 Avignon Festival, Frédric readily offers that the experience showed him how sacred the space of theatre is: ‘Chéreau taught me that everything was possible, that we must push our dreams as far as possible, and that it takes supreme energy, like Chéreau’s own, to confront the abyss [that precedes creation]’ (Frédric 2006).
