The award-winning Brazilian actor Wagner Moura is to star in a new play being staged at three European festivals next year, in the first joint production since their foundation two years after the second world war.
Moura, who is being tipped for an Oscar nomination for the Secret Agent, will take the lead role in a new production updating the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People to examine modern political and environmental conflicts.
The play is being co-funded by the Edinburgh international festival (EIF), the Festival d’Avignon in France and the Amsterdam-based Holland festival, which were all founded in 1947 in an effort to rebuild European art after the war.
Officials from the three festivals said there were powerful echoes today with that period, with Europe again struggling with war, the far right and economic crises. That made their collaboration, which will continue for three years, all the more timely, they said.
The play, The Trial: Enemy of the People, is being staged by the celebrated Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy, who has previously worked closely with all three festivals. She said the play was informed by modern battles with fascism.
In a joint press conference with the three festivals, Jatahy said Brazil had suffered very recently with the authoritarianism of former president Jair Bolsonaro, while the Cop30 climate talks in Belém in Amazonia had been the stage for environmental conflict, with Indigenous leaders fighting security guards for access to the talks.
The Bolsonaro regime was a “horrible moment”, she said. “Fascism is everywhere now, and it’s this new fascism that used the economy and the instruments of democracy to stay in power.” This was “really understood” in Brazil, she said.
Brazilians were “very connected” with the environmental and climate crises, she added. “So we really know about that. And we live this in the present moment, not in the past … how this destruction affected the very direct, personal life of the people.”
She said the play featured the main protagonist of Ibsen’s play, Thomas Stockmann, who in Ibsen’s production had raised the alarm about contaminated water in his town’s spas, being put on trial.
In her production, 11 audience members would act as the jury each night. While nearly all the dialogue was scripted, about 5% would be improvised, based on the actors’ interactions with the jury’s decisions.
Moura, who will play Stockmann and helped write the script, became the first South American to win best actor at Cannes for the Secret Agent earlier this year, as well as winning a Golden Globe nomination for the Netflix series Narcos in 2016 and a Golden Eye award for career achievement at the Zurich film festival this year.
The Edinburgh international festival is putting many of its tickets for The Trial on sale later this month, alongside tickets for three other major productions: the first performances in Edinburgh by the Berlin Philharmonic, regarded by many as the world’s pre-eminent orchestra, since 2006; a production of Verdi’s The Masked Ball; and a new San Francisco Ballet piece featuring an original score by the electronic music producer Floating Points.
The Holland festival will be selling theirs from late November while tickets for Avignon’s performances will go on sale in coming months.
Roy Luxford, the EIF’s creative director, said the bulk of next year’s festival tickets would go on sale in March as usual, but the festival needed to innovate by increasing choice. Some festivalgoers could appreciate the opportunity to plan further ahead while “these tickets would make great Christmas gifts”.
Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Festival d’Avignon, which focuses primarily on theatre and takes place in July, said their cooperation was “probably needed more than ever because of all the threats to both the economy of the arts, but also to the presence of arts in democracy”.
Ibsen’s original play was prophetic, he added. “This piece deals also with ecology, with justice and with corruption, with the organisation of society. Let’s say that it’s a piece that is able to put in a nutshell many of the great issues of our day.”
Despite their shared history, Emily Ansenk, the director of the Holland festival, which takes place in June, said the festivals had worked with one another in pairs before but never all three at once.
“We are not afraid to put bold art and bold artists on stage, and I think that’s something where we can find each other very, very easily,” Ansenk said. “So the artistic conversation is very interesting also about our positioning. We are different from each other and we have different focus points, but in the end, we artistically really connect.”
