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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
Born in Grasse in 1965, Olivier Py studied in Paris. After intensive pre-university preparation at the Lycée Fénelon, he entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in 1987 and at the same time began studying theology. The following year, he wrote his first play, Des Oranges et des ongles, and founded the company “L’inconvénient des boutures”. In 1995, he created an event at the Avignon Festival by directing his text La Servante, a cycle of plays lasting 24 hours. In 1997, he became director of the Centre dramatique national d’Orléans, which he left in 2007 to direct the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. In 2013, he became the first director appointed to head the Avignon Festival since Jean Vilar. In 2023, he was appointed director of the Théâtre du Châtelet. Olivier Py is a prolific writer and director of theatre and opera, as well as a comedian and poet. A socially engaged artist, he has directed numerous plays in which the theatrical word places politics at the centre, such as Les Sept contre Thèbes and Les Suppliantes, The Persians by Aeschylus, King Lear by William Shakespeare, or personal texts such as Les Vainqueurs, Orlando or Impatience or Die Sonne for the Volksbühne… In the wake of this, based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, he began writing an operetta for children, to whom he suggested that they should believe in their desires above all. L’Amour vainqueur was presented at the 73rd edition of the Avignon Festival, representing a so-called ‘poor theatre’ in which uncompromising abruptness is combined with lyricism and hope. In 2021, with the adventure of Hamlet à l’impératif!, Olivier Py fulfilled two desires: firstly, taking over the garden of the Ceccano library to offer a theatrical soap opera with free admission and in the open air, bringing together professional and amateur actors; and tackling the Hamlet ‘continent’ in a radically new interpretation.
At the Opéra de Lausanne: La Vase de parfums (2005), Mam’zelle Nitouche (2019) and L’Amour vainqueur (2022).
Pierre-André Weitz took his first steps on stage at the Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang at the age of ten, where he acted and sang, as well as making and designing sets and costumes until he was 25 years old. At the same time, he studied architecture in Strasbourg and entered the Conservatoire d’art lyrique. During this period, he was a chorister at the Opéra national du Rhin. In 1989, he met Olivier Py and since then he has designed all the latter’s sets and costumes. He has created more than 150 sets for various other directors, both in theatre and opera (Jean Chollet, Michel Raskine, Claude Buchvald, Jean-Michel Rabeux, Ivan Alexandre, Jacques Vincey, Hervé Loichemol, Sylvie Rentona, Karelle Prugnaud, Mireille Delunsch, Christine Berg…). This research into space and time has also led him to perform as a musician or as an author in certain shows. He has been teaching stage design for over 20 years at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg. Recently, he directed Les Chevaliers de la Table ronde and Mam’zelle Nitouche, two Palazzetto Bru Zane productions.
At the Opéra de Lausanne: La Vase de parfums (2005) and L’Amour vainqueur (2022).