Upon her release, she discovers a world ravaged by conflict and misery. To find her prince, our heroine gives way to listening to her desires and confronts a general who knows only how to sow chaos.
Olivier Py’s fourth show inspired by the Grimm brothers, L’amour vainqueur is an operetta in which five characters – a willful princess, a disfigured suitor, an evil general, an eco-friendly gardener and a dishwashing girl – take us in white alexandrines into their adventures made of love, transvestism and struggle. In this show for children, the author and director combines with spirit the pleasure of musical theater and the awareness of a troubled world: ours. He responds to despair with fantasy, to war with song, so that love, in the company of actors, singers and musicians, may be victorious.
Production
Festival d’Avignon
Coproduction
Opéra de Lausanne, Opéra de Limoges, Scène nationale du Sud-Aquitain (Bayonne), Théâtre Georges-Leygues (Villeneuve-sur-Lot)
With the help of Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe Résidence à la FabricA du Festival d’Avignon
Text by Olivier Py
First performance at the Avignon Festival, 2019
Actes Sud – papier Edition
with Clémentine Bourgoin, Pierre Lebon
Flannan Obé, Antoni Sykopoulos
Author, director and actor Olivier Py studied at the École nationale supérieure d’arts et techniques du théâtre in Lyon, then at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris, alongside his theological studies.
His first play, Des oranges et des ongles, was directed by Didier Lafaye in 1988. That year, he founded his own theatrical group. He is a regular guest of the Avignon Festival, where he created La Servante, histoire sans fin, a cycle of plays over 24 hours, and L’énigme Vilar, a tribute to the actor Jean Vilar presented in the Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes at the closing ceremony of the festival’s 60th edition.
In 1998, he was appointed director of the Centre dramatique national in Orléans, and was the director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe from 2007 to 2011. He was named director of the Avignon Festival in 2013.
At the Opéra de Lausanne: he designed the set and lighting for Le vase de parfums in 2005 and Loriot in Mam’zelle Nitouche (2019).
At a young age, Pierre-André Weitz worked as an actor, singer and set and costume designer at the Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang. He studied architecture before entering the Conservatoire d’art lyrique and becoming a chorister at the Opéra du Rhin. His work includes over 150 stage designs and since the age of 18, he has worked with Jean Chollet, Michel Raskine, Claude Buchvald, Jean-Michel Rabeux, Ivan Alexandre, Jacques Vincey, Hervé Loichemol, Sylvie Rentona, Karelle Prugnaud, Mireille Delunch and Christine Berg.
Since meeting Oliver Py, he has designed all of his sets and costumes and developed a stage philosophy in which set changes are a response to a dramaturgical and choreographic exploration. For Alceste at the Opéra de Paris, for example, he drew all the sets during the show, to express a pictorial ephemerality, a musical metaphor. He also directed La Serinette by Olivier Py in Strasbourg, played three times in a row with different aesthetics and set-ups, proving that stage design can alter the meaning and the essence of a work without betraying it.
He recently directed Les chevaliers de la Table ronde with Les Brigands and the Palazetto Bru Zane. He has been teaching stage design for 20 years at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg.
At the Opéra de Lausanne: he designed the set and costumes for Le vase de parfums in 2005.